As Oculus Rift inches closer and closer to its official consumer releases slated for early 2016, the Facebook Inc-owned company is progressively revealing more details about the virtual reality device. Responding to a question about X-rated virtual reality media and apps, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey responded that the company has no plans to block such content.

“The Rift is an open platform,” Luckey said at the first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in San Jose, California. “We don’t control what software can run on it.”

The idea of virtual reality porn is at least as old as the technology itself, so it comes as no surprise that people might want to develop naughty content for the Rift, but Oculus’ hands off approach is somewhat unexpected, especially given the usually conservative stance of its parent company, Facebook.

Facebook has been criticized by both artists and free speech activists for its strict anti-nudity rules, both on the social network itself and on other services like Instagram. For example, Instagram faced a strong backlash after it removed photos of a breastfeeding mother.

Instagram later reinstated the pictures, and it has since changed its community guidelines policies to explicitly allow breastfeeding photos and pictures of mastectomy scars. While some users praised this action as a step in the right direction, others still criticized Facebook for censoring other images with nudity regardless of their content or purpose.

Although Luckey says that Oculus will not block X-rated media or apps, the company will almost certainly not support pornography through its official app platform. Instead, developers would have to offer the content through their own distribution systems.

This, combined with the already difficult challenges posed to all VR content creators, means that virtual reality porn likely has a long way to go before it can be a viable product. It is also difficult to imagine how large the market for VR porn could be, given the high costs involved with both buying a Rift and building the beefy computer system required to use it.

Then again, maybe porn could contribute to the widespread adoption of VR the same way it did with the internet.

Image credit: Weird Science | Universal Pictures (c)