Looking for VR porn that feels a little… different?
My favourite release from Braindance VR was a yoga class on my office floor.
That… probably wasn’t the verdict you’d expect from a porn review. It wasn’t quite what I expected either. But Yoga For Beginners, actually hit me in the pants far more than another promise about 8K resolution ever could.
Then there was Sola Zola’s Art Therapy: a series of frozen 3D stills that left me wondering whether I was reviewing porn or if I’d broken into Porn Valley’s version of Madame Tussauds. These quieter, artistic releases were among the experiences I liked most – a testament to where Braindance VR is looking to differentiate from a raft of VR porn competition.
(Maybe I’m simply not used to seeing this shit unfold in my home office…)
Braindance’s USP is “volumetric capture”: adult performers reconstructed in three dimensions, with a viewpoint you can move around. Use it with passthrough and your own room becomes the setting. The result feels very different from sitting behind the lens of a conventional VR video.
At its best, the immersion is pretty spectacular.
Braindance can make a series of short poses (just a few seconds each) feel just as immersive as a big budget POV video in a Californian studio. It’s not perfect – some scenes make eye contact decidedly weird and there’s a few visual glitches when you wander. It doesn’t always feel that the performer is necessarily responding to you – but rather, looking straight through you.
Still, if you have yet to experience VR porn… I’m actually quite jealous of the wow factor it’s likely to induce.
Braindance VR Porn Review: A New Perspective on POV
We’ve been covering VR porn sites for several years now and we’re used to judging studios (and aggregators) for their breadth of content. The visual fidelity of scenes has come a long way – but the top studios are mostly now wrestling over the small print, like who can get license rights to the biggest library.
As such, conventional VR porn often makes its case through more: more detail, more elaborate sets, more of whatever the studio thinks will keep you watching. And particularly, more pixels.
An immaculate 8K production is an obvious thing to sell, right?
That’s why the thumbnails on these sites are splattered with viewing specs.
Braindance made me question how much of that I actually needed.
Case in point: Solo Zola, a lithe redhead doing yoga on my office floor had a peculiar advantage over yet another round of Meta Quest escapism to a far-away porn studio. Her presence right there in front of me felt intimate on a whole different level.
See a clip example here.
It’s my less-is-more theory. The novelty comes partly from stripping away the production around the performer and letting your own surroundings do some of the work.
A relatively simple scene can be more than enough when its spatial relationship to you feels convincing.
Art Therapy pushes that thought further. Frozen stills hardly sound like a demonstration of the future of the VR porn industry. Yet I enjoyed them; and I certainly enjoyed shoving my face where it probably didn’t belong. You can spend time with the composition and your changing viewpoint without a director hurrying you along to the next beat.
Is it art or is it porn?
That’s the teaser for the video. As far as I’m concerned, whatever it is… is a worthy addition to the fap folder.
That doesn’t mean everybody will want the restrained stuff, or that Braindance is shy about cranking up the explicit content. It does mean Braindance shouldn’t be judged solely by how closely it reproduces the conventional porn scene. Some of its most immersive material is born from the viewer’s freedom to really step inside the scene.
We’ve already explored the appeal of bringing content into familiar surroundings in our passthrough feature and AR platform guide.
Braindance adds another variable: you can change your position relative to the performer.
What Volumetric Capture Actually Changes
Ordinary stereoscopic VR180 gives each eye a slightly different image, which is ultimately how we perceive depth.
You can turn your head and look around the recorded view, but there’s no escaping that the camera occupied a particular position when the scene was produced. So if you lean sideways, that doesn’t give you a newly filmed view around someone’s shoulder.
Removing the background for passthrough doesn’t, by itself, solve that problem.
It lets the footage share your surroundings while retaining the limitations of the original capture.
So… Braindance’s volumetric approach is actually pretty novel.
It reconstructs the scene so the system can render another viewpoint when you move. It’s the so-called “six degrees of freedom“, or 6DoF, which basically means tracking both the direction you look and your position: forwards and backwards, sideways, up and down.
You can get up and explore the space instead of merely looking around from a fixed camera perspective. And the view changes appropriately, as it would in real life.
To achieve this, Braindance uses a rig of 165 cameras(!) and software using Gaussian splatting to reconstruct the performers. This partly explains why each of the clips are short and looped. You’re not going to get a 40 minute long-form video out of a setup like this.
Gaussian splatting is quite a technical process but it involves stitching together a scene using many overlapping, partly transparent coloured elements in 3D space. Think of them collectively building up the subject’s appearance from different viewpoints. Dynamic capture extends that reconstruction through time… which enables freedom of movement.
All this means that shifting your head can reveal a different side to the performer. Reconstructing all those views convincingly is no easy feat… and I have no idea what the studio spends on a single scene, but it’s likely a very convoluted process.
There’s also a lot that can go wrong in production.
Awkward angles, hidden surfaces and overlapping bodies create problems that a fixed-view video can keep out of shot. More freedom gives you more opportunities to find the joins… and from what I saw, some of the clips certainly break the illusion in places (especially those shot with a full 360 degree view).
But all things considered, if you look at the newest clips (or ‘memories’ as Braindance calls them): the team is getting better and better at hiding the machinery.
Hunting For Glitches
Braindance VR is immediately impressive to the naked eye.
The illusion holds strong… but it can break if you get too nosy.
When I stayed relatively stationary, the visual quality was generally very good. With the background stripped away and the performer right in front of me, there were moments where I was thinking “Holy shit, we’ve unlocked the next level of porn here.“
I suspect somebody coming to this medium without much VR experience would have his pants blown off.
More experienced viewers will have things to pick at. I did notice some clipping and stray artefacts, especially when venturing closer and closer to the performer. Those flaws inevitably became easier to find as I wandered or tried more extreme viewpoints.
Get down around Emma Rosie’s kneecaps and you might want to dim the lights to maintain the illusion of fidelity.
You may also accidentally discover the rough edges of your home furniture…
(Please do ensure you have a clear space before your dick ends up concussed. 🤦♂️)
My bigger complaint was eye contact. It’s something that I know Braindance has been working to fix, but it sticks out in the older vids. The effort to keep looking at me didn’t always work smoothly once I started moving around. Sometimes the gaze felt awkward or darting, and the more convincing the rest of the scene looked, the more noticeable it became.
We’re not comfortably out of the uncanny valley yet, at least to my eyes.
And honestly, I’m not even sure how much of this is fixable. The human brain is just so damn good at spotting a projected porn star from a real one in your office. I’d be lying if I said I’d ever experienced the latter, but I’d trust myself to spot the real one 100 times out of 100.
There’s also a directing problem here as well as a visual one. In conventional POV footage, the camera gives the performer a clear point of focus. But a roaming viewer could be anywhere… how is she to know I’m hanging upside down from the chandelier with my cock out? There’s only so much you can do, right?
I can’t tell you which parts of Braindance’s gaze behaviour come from the recorded performance and which come from its software. I can tell you that putting a performer in your room is not the same as making her aware that you’re there, and it probably never will be.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal.
What they’ve built here is super impressive.
At the time of my test, just over half the scenes offered full 360-degree viewing. Those were fun to explore but I’m not sure it impacts the actual visceral nature of the clips. You can only be in one place at once. I don’t need to be loitering over her shoulder or sniffing her back crevices to enjoy the experience.
Across the material I tried, the newer releases appeared to be improving quickly. The scenes are also rated by fellow users, and that’s the signpost I used for working out what to test first.
Your Internet Speed Matters
There was another practical difference between releases: the bandwidth labels.
Some couple scenes displayed requirements of 175+ Mbps, while others were tagged around 80 Mbps. Those are just the stated recommendations, not throughput measurements I made or minimum requirements for accessing the clips.
I didn’t encounter noticeable lag or buffering. But I also have a very fast internet connection, so that experience doesn’t tell us how the same scenes might react if you’re browsing from the arse end of nowhere.
If your connection already struggles with high-bitrate VR, it’s definitely worth sticking with the less-bandwidth-gobbling releases.
The Original Content Library on Braindance
There were 91 “Memory Cards” when I tested (that’s their terminology for a spliced video set), and the material follows a formulaic structure.
This includes a distinct shortage of meat and veg.
I encountered just the one penis in their entire archive (a single Boy+Girl video starring Jason Carrera and Geisha Kyd).
But I did find a lot of dildos.
You might think male performers is a surprising omission for a porn platform, but it makes a lot of sense when you consider how awkward these clips are to film.
If you’re expecting the usual range of partnered POV productions, a shelf of volumetric experiences isn’t going to contain as much actual sex as you might find elsewhere. As I said above, I don’t think that impacts the overall experience.
There are lesbian memories, though, including Sharing Desserts with Christy White and Jewelz Blu.
This particular encounter involved a dildo and a picnic blanket, improbably relocated to my office floor.
Probably the first and last time I ever host scissoring lesbians with a WordPress tab open.
There’s something to be said for home comforts and VR porn.
Recognising your own floor underneath the world’s dirtiest picnic blanket is enough to short-circuit the brain: “Oi, old fart: this could be you!“
Elsewhere, I noticed that Braindance is experimenting with other types of branching storylines – something that will be familiar to any fans of CYOA porn.
The first experiment is The Two Sides of Paradise, featuring Ophelia Fae. The first choice I encountered was simple: “Stay in the Shadow” or “Make Your Move”, leading through a sequence of clips where she gets progressively naughtier… whether you choose to reveal your presence or not.
Anyone expecting an intricate game narrative should lower their expectations a few floors. It’s basically a standard Memory with two filmed sequences that you can lightly guide. Hardly a game changer, but a useful direction for Braindance to explore.
A Passable Supporting Library
The main event on Braindance is unquestionably their in-house content.
But the team is also moving fast to put together something resembling an ‘all-in-one’ pass – a library of conventional VR porn to satisfy fans who might only have the cash for a single VR porn subscription.
During my test, the imported collection listed 287 VR videos, with partner studios including Naughty America VR, RealJamVR, KinkVR and Virtual Taboo.
On these numbers, I don’t see the standard collection as a compelling reason to subscribe on its own.
If catalogue breadth is your number one priority, the obvious place to start is with the established aggregators (see our SexLikeReal review).
New DreamCam Partnership
There’s also a live-cam section, which is brought to you via DreamCam, following a partnership announced in September.
This is a smart play to give the platform some stickiness.
It adds live VR streams alongside the recorded catalogue.
I checked out a few shows and saw full nudity outside private sessions. The setup felt like a freemium hybrid, with public viewing alongside tipping and paid private shows. I didn’t try any of the private shows but if you want to explore them, you’ll need to add credits to your account. It’s not included with the standard subscription.
Honestly, I probably wouldn’t come here exclusively for the cams, either – rival sites serve up a better UX for those.
Together with the studio videos, however, the live shows help to make Braindance feel more like a rounded VR hub. Once the initial fascination with volumetric capture settles, the service still needs reasons for you to return – and there are plenty of VR cam girls online at any given time to ensure just that.
My interest remains firmly parked with the Memory Cards. It’s the standout feature and it marks a completely different VR porn experience from the work put out by most studios.
If you already have a compatible setup and want to understand what moving beyond a fixed VR viewpoint changes, Braindance is definitely worth a look.
Head over to BraindanceVR.com for a full demo.
A subscription starts from $24.99/month – or $89.99 for a full year.
