The notion of Virtual Reality has been around as long as there’s been science fiction itself. Yet, in spite of a few movies in the nineties, the research being done was forced to take a break as Uncle Sugar, staggering as it faced a ton of national debt incurred as President Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union – in what proved to be the big cock contest to end all big cock contests – and cut funding to both NASA and the NSC. Meanwhile, more than a few early dotcom millionaires put in heavy bucks and also got a dose of non-virtual reality as the stock market ate them out and spat them out. Faced with so much boom and bust, the tiny VR industry hibernated, its engineers and designers doing other stuff for a while.

Now, however, with big tech the new here-to-stay phenomenon, making billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban and Steve Ballmer into latter-day robber-barons, nothing can surprise us any longer. Thus, less than eighteen months ago I was writing about Oculus Rift-brand development kits being available from its cash-strapped developer, the now 22-year-old Palmer Luckey, on Kickstarter for an investment of $350. The initial word was that OR would change the way we saw and participated in movies and video games within a generation.  A few months later I was reporting that Mark Zuckerburg, the ginger-haired boy genius who had started Facebook while studying at Harvard, had bought the company for a staggering $2 billion.

As quickly as all this has happened, a new group called VR Japan, has risen to meet the needs of this this new ‘craze.’ Visible only on Facebook here in the U.S. and Europe, they have already hosted an Oculus Rift Game Jam and are about to put together an even bigger one on January 23-25, 2015, which will be held simultaneously in Malmo, Sweden, Kyoto, Tokyo and Nagoya in Japan; Canisius University, Penn State’s Behrend’s campus, MIT in Cambridge, Mass in the US, as well was others in Minsk, Amman, Jordan, Tucuman, Argentina, Johannesburg in South Africa and Salerno in Italy, among other locations, are still tentative lobalgamejam.org/2015/jam-sites.

These events show quite clearly that beyond capitalism there is a kind of wonderful democracy at work in countries where developers have gained access to early versions of the virtual reality display, and are occasions for creative thinking about ways to apply the Oculus to generate immersive new gaming experiences.

Now in the spirit of entrepreneurship, there’s always got to be someone who’s ahead of everybody else. The biggest publicity so far has been gained by someone anonymous at last year’s Tokyo Oculus Jam who invented a kind of Flight-of-the Phoenix, Rube-Goldberg-ish piece of sexual gadgetry that allows its operator—wearing a pair of O.R. goggles—to connect to a Novint Falcon—which is a grip-based, haptic joystick-type controller—which in turn connects to a Tenga. The Tenga, a commonly used Japanese industrial-strength masturbator, is the, umm, metaphorical sort of dream catcher that transforms virtual reality into true reality. Used as prescribed by its anonymous inventor, the operator would insert his penis into the Tenga. The Tenga would then go through a copulation-type process manipulated by the Falcon. Needless to say the videos about this process, broadcast on YouTube, Yahoo News and in various newspapers have received tens of millions of hits.

The rest has to be, for the time being, just speculation. Nevertheless, business is business, and, doubtless, some inventor geek somewhere is working on a prototype device for a VR consumer device that will eventually bring an old testament-sized menu of streaming pornography that will create a world of ecstatically happy wankers. Will, one wonders, Palmer Luckey be seen as the father of all of this?

Last, but not least, let me leave you with this. In a HuffPost/YouGov survey conducted in April, eighteen percent of respondents said they believed sex robots would be available by 2030, while only nine percent said they would have sex with a robot if they had the opportunity. In the eternal words of Bing Crosby: “Keep Hope alive!!!”