I don't know about formal studies, but I've read many an article (insert appropriate "reading for the articles" joke here) talking about how demand for porn influenced early adoption of most new forms of media:

printing, broadsheets, photos, different forms of film, and definitely computer video. (Here in Seattle I recall reading about some form of early adult film that shows up notably in local laws...some form of -scope, though I don't recall the name)

DVD-HD vs blu-ray? Adult industry influence was not small. When HD rolled around, the adult industries had notable influence. Where did the makeup techniques for dealing with such high def come from? Porn.

I think the comparison to the "8 glasses of water" standard might be off because unlike that, here no one is claiming a precise measurement, merely an observation of trends.

VHS and Betamax was maybe influenced by the adult industry (although sports seems to have mattered as well)

Parroting the same about HD/Blu-ray is kind of hilarious though. Porn was deep into the streaming game long before blu-ray hit the scene.

> long before blu-ray hit the scene

When the dust settled, perhaps, but I recall when the issue first came up in 2000 and just about every discussion argued technical merits...and where the porn industry was looking. Anecdotal data, but in 2000 streaming wasn't viable for the majority of users (and still remains not viable for a lot) so that's no reason to discount the impact in that arena.

Only if massive pixels on an offbrand realplayer that only two sites used and had to be installed to your desktop counts as "deep into streaming."

It also froze every 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Awlgy3qUSE

Given the bandwidth porn has consumed since literally the beginning of the internet, I think it's fair to say that they can be credited with significant technology gains too.

As a recent (but maybe not too important) example, PH created hover-to-autoplay-gif for video thumbnails and then YouTube copied it.

Is that why YouTube thumbnails seem to focus on segments with a woman wearing little clothing, even though it’s a small part of the video?

Funny related story! At Reddit we built a tool to create thumbnails for webpages. The algo was basically find the biggest “squareish” image and then remove a row or column of pixels. The row/col was chosen based on which one left the image with the most entropy. We kept doing this until the image was a square.

That algo basically cuts off women’s heads and leaves just their cleavage.

Obviously we had to adjust it to try and avoid that, but even today you’ll see thumbnails on Reddit that are just cleavage.

I thought that a face would contain more entropy than two flesh mounds! Color me surprised. Could the algorithm be tweaked to favor removable from the bottom part of the image, since humans generally perceive from top to bottom? Most images contain the 'meat' at the top or middle, I'd assume?

We thought so to! But it turns out that a nose, mouth, neck, and chest have more entropy than a face.

I don’t remember exactly how we fixed it but I think biasing towards the top was involved.

Link from yesterday shows some good examples of the "algo" (seam carving):

https://avikdas.com/2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-fo...

Seam carving gone wrong?

Of course, along with the very-fucking-annoying Youtube Face [0]. It's so ordinary to mess with human psychology, anything to increase click through rates!

[0] https://boingboing.net/2018/04/11/youtube-face-the-same-thum...

It seems like most of the examples of that are "reaction" videos, and if you're trying to sell a reaction video, you show the reaction, right?

I see it everywhere, not just on reaction videos.

I can count the number of reaction videos I've seen on one hand but the YouTube face is all over my homepage.

The next iteration to this is out, it's using extreme Snapchat-esque filters to comically exaggerate the size of the eyes and mouth of a reaction face.

It's mesmerisingly disgusting, I wonder what the next steps are. More digital augmentation awaits?

> I see it everywhere, not just on reaction videos.

I have seen them in in-store advertising in supermarkets.

> I wonder what the next steps are. More digital augmentation awaits?

Virtual/retouched streaming personas. It's already a thing in japan and among furries.

What software is being used to create virtual personas? Am I right in understanding that this work isn't being done by Western companies?

I haven't dug deeply, but there seems to be a whole ecosystem. An open source avatar data format[0], full body motion capture software[1], this stuff integrates with standard 3d software environments such as unity/unreal/blender/maya/max. So does commercial software[2]. For the hardware it can be a simple web/phone camera on the low end (giving you a talking head) over camera + VR trackers + an iphone for the face sensor to high end rigs with multiple cameras and mocap suits.

[0] https://vrm.dev/en/ [1] https://github.com/sh-akira/VirtualMotionCapture [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ_5d_1NHCQ

I don't think it's 100% the same thing (VRM appears to be full body, not just face), but FaceRig[1] is a similar concept made by a Romanian studio.

[1] https://facerig.com/

If people had the star trek holodeck around today what would one of its primary uses be

I mean, there would be holodeck sex, but unless you're a teenage boy, you're not going to do that more than maybe twice a day max, and you're usually going to do it alone. After you get off, you do the same thing even teenagers do today with the internet: you start playing shooting/fighting games with all your buddies.

Another example is VR/remote control toys adoption - Mindgeek was pretty early adopter of VR porn and remote control toys with synchronization of video frames.