When I visit Sega Joypolis on a weekday, there’s barely enough people lined up to fill the eight player slots, but the simulation is impressive enough to turn anyone into a VR evangelist. In other words: they put all those leftover headsets to use in Japan’s “game centres” instead. With interest in consumer headsets nonexistent, “the VR pioneers shifted their focus to applying the tech on a different target group, and under a totally different business model”, says Serkan Toto, CEO of the Tokyo-based analyst firm Kantan Games. In Japan, on the other hand, the hype only started building after 2016.

Rather than setting the standard for interactive entertainment, the technology has remained a novelty – despite the backing of companies such as Facebook and Sony (whose Playstation VR headset, though relatively successful, has been adopted by just under 3% of PlayStation 4 owners). In the west, a couple of years after the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets became available to the public, VR hype is fast evaporating. And further south, on the artificial island of Odaiba, Sega recently cleared out a massive room in its Joypolis amusement park to make space for Zero Latency VR, a “warehouse scale, free-roam, multiplayer virtual reality entertainment” where a team of zombie hunters are equipped with “military-grade” motion-tracking backpacks and let loose on the undead with an arsenal of plastic firearms. I’m staring at a billboard for a virtual brothel.Ī stone’s throw away is Bandai Namco’s massive VR Zone complex, an indoor, 38,000 sq ft all-VR theme park that opened just over a year ago. As my eyes wander to the logo in the corner, I realise that the poster is promoting Soft On Demand – one of Japan’s biggest porn, or “AV” (adult video), companies. At first glance, it looks like nothing out of the ordinary: a woman cheerfully donning a VR headset, with kanji lettering welcoming passersby to come in and try the technology for themselves. O ne day, on my way past the outskirts of Kabukichō – Tokyo’s red-light district, infamously depicted in the Yakuza games – I spot a curious advertisement.

Virtual sex games 2018