It was only a matter of time until a website like this one came along in the VR space. See, although Sex Like Real has some of its own original material, it has also licensed thousands of virtual reality pornography from third-party studios, giving them a huge edge over the competition when it comes to the sheer scale of their library and how much smut you can get your hands on.
Sex Like Real has its own app, innovative passthrough VR material, interactive releases and more – sounds fantastic on paper, but what’s the actual experience like as a user here? Today, I’m going to head inside the member’s area and put all of what this hub has to offer to the test.
If Sex Like Real can deliver what it promises, it’s going to be a highly competitive destination that anyone who’s serious about virtual reality debauchery ought to consider as their go-to spot for goodies.
Let’s take a closer look in our hands-on Sex Like Real review.
Sex Like Real Review: First Impressions
Sex Like Real was first available to the masses back in 2015 and from this interview I found with the guy behind the project – Alex Novak – it’s quite clear that they take playback quality, formatting and accessibility seriously.
They’re particularly focused on ensuring that any VR videos they host are optimized: in the early days of adult entertainment, stereoscopic alignments were pretty rough – this is something that the team here actively fixes for any scene that they host. As much as this is a capitalist venture, it’s clear that Alex is passionate about what he’s doing – always a good sign.
The company has received a decent number of awards: some are pretty damn impressive, too. XBIZ gave them their 2023 award for Best Virtual Reality Site of the Year: they also received AVN’s Best VR Scene for 2023 and 2024. Finally: the GFY adult webmaster forum recognized them as their Best VR Affiliate Program in 2021, so at the customer and business level, it’s clear this is a serious operation.
Alex Novak has quite a few blog posts on the platform: one about the choosing a VR porn headset is particularly useful if you’ve not got one yet. Long story short – he recommends grabbing the Meta Quest 3, mainly because of its ability to handle the passthrough scenes they’ve got and the 120 FPS playback it supports.
You can spend some time looking at the tour if you want an overview of the project and some teaser material. When it’s time to sign up for a premium subscription, here are your options:
I was lucky enough to visit the site during a sale period, but since it’s just ‘January Sale’ (not Christmas, Black Friday, etc.), chances are these discounts aren’t exactly that rare.
The ‘videos + scripts’ toggle is there so you can purchase support for sex toys that you attach to your junk and that pleasure you in cadence with the content you’re watching. It’s an extra $10 per month on the rebill option, so $29.99. If you don’t have a toy, no need to buy it.
One thing I appreciate about Sex Like Real is the fact that they’re up front about their limitations and fair use policy. This is what you’ll see below the membership options pane:
I’ll touch on these restrictions later down the road, but the fact it’s not buried in the T&Cs and presented before you pay any money is really appreciated. That’s ethical business in my books – hard to find these days, especially in the porn space!
Aside from the optional scripts, every membership at Sex Like Real is exactly the same. There are no other tiered packages or restrictions. Once I paid for my membership, I was automatically logged in and that was that. Cancelling my subscription was incredibly easy too: you just have to click two buttons in your user profile area and that’s that. Automatic and no messing around.
The SLR Member’s Area
I tend to prefer reviewing adult websites on desktop – even for VR platforms – simply because there’s little difference between the experience you’ll get on a headset, outside of convenience.
The first block of preview panes you’ll come across in the member’s area showcase the top rated scenes: it’s nice that you can quickly switch to the latest uploads using the button at the top. Generally speaking, fresher VR material is better – especially when you see new faces and girls in the industry who have never done a virtual reality skin flick before!
In terms of frequency, it’s really all over the place in terms of uploads per 24 hours. Some days it’s 20 new releases, other days it’s up to 40: all I can promise is a constant stream of third-party releases, as well as some original productions, each and every time you visit the platform. It really cannot be understated how great it is to have dozens of new VR porn scenes every day to watch.
I did come across one advert in the member’s area: it was for a Handy, which is a automatic toy you can utilize on the platform with their scripts. It was quoted at $199 – since I’m in an office with other people, it’s not quite appropriate for me to try out the Handy, but if the reviews are anything to go by, the teledildonics support here is the best in the business.
Video Analysis
Quantity
Before you get into Sex Like Real, there are numbers all over the place. The tour promises 29k+ scenes, but the about section states it’s over 31k instead. Furthermore, the fine print below the signup form (see above) has a very specific number: 30,869 scenes. So, how many videos did I find inside?
If I click on the library area of Sex Like Real, it shows that there are 27,283 scenes that I can currently watch. Truth be told: I have zero idea why none of these numbers line up. Look: I don’t think there’s a sufficient difference between 27k and 31k videos, but it’s somewhat annoying that none of the values line up, simply because I’m worried I’ve missed a section here with a few thousand videos that are special or different in some capacity.
Regardless, the VR content library here is ridiculously large. To my knowledge, there’s no bigger database on the Internet for virtual reality smut.
Now, given that the videos come from a number of different sources, lengths vary wildly. Some videos here are just 8 minutes, whereas others go for an hour and beyond. There are a few compilation scenes here and they’re also mixed length, though 30 to 60 minutes is about what you can expect from these types of uploads.
Quality
If we go way back into the archives to the very first videos ever uploaded at Sex Like Real, they’re offered in a maximum resolution of 3K. This was par for the course back then: one scene I grabbed was 3200 x 1600 pixels, 50 FPS and had a bitrate of 5 Mb/s. It’s not too bad, but man – the technology and quality of VR has come a long way, that’s for damn sure.
Looking toward recent uploads, SLR originals can be accessed in both 8K and 4K resolutions, with lower quality stuff offered if you have a headset that cannot render top-end scenes.
I was actually quite surprised at the relatively low bitrate the 4K scene had: clocking in at just 8.8 Mb/s, this is far below the numbers we’ve seen from other services. Subjectively, it looked fine and honestly, I couldn’t tell that it was running at such a low bitrate.
My guess is that SLR has done a lot of research and concluded that you don’t need a 30 Mb/s bitrate for a 4K scene – it looks just fine with a third of that. Note that the 8K upload here is 8000 x 4000: slightly bigger than other 8K scenes I’ve seen.
Somewhat surprisingly, third-party studio content here appears to be rendered to the specifications that SLR prefers. I was actually able to compare the same scene from Virtual Real Porn’s member’s area to the one hosted at SLR: the 8K version hosted by the original studio was 13.51 GB and ran at 52.8 Mb/s, whereas the one at SLR clocked in at 5.71 GB and 22.2 Mb/s.
I asked on Discord about this and got a quick reply. There is a download button for the full original if you want it: just click the ‘more download options’ dropdown. Streaming at Sex Like Real offers a range of formats: 1080p all the way up to 3840p. Most recent uploads have 7 different tiers of resolutions and bitrates to select from if you want to stream.
Some quick numbers for you: 4,200 8K scenes, 5,100 7K scenes and 20,000 5K scenes.
Download Speed
The download experience at Sex Like Real is about as good as it can be. I was able to consistently sustain a speed of around 100 MB/s – yes, that’s megabytes per second. Some other sites have managed to saturate my connection with a slightly higher rate, but this is very much at the upper end of what porn platforms offer.
A 10 GB file here took me just over two minutes to download. You can have parallel fines going at the same time, but do remember that you’re limited to 30 downloads per 6 days. I really appreciate the speed, but I think the download quota could be a little better. I don’t think most users will be impacted by it, but I doubt they’re going to suffer much if they increased it to, say, 100 per week.
Content Analysis
Difficult to know where to start here, since there’s just so much porn. Truth be told, I watched a few scenes with my Meta Quest 2 just to make sure they worked, but even if I went through 20, 30 or even 50 scenes – I’m not scratching the surface with regard to the range of material afforded to me by SLR. This is always going to be the ‘problem’ – at least for a reviewer – when it comes to collections like this: so many damn options.
SLR has a porn categories area with a huge number of niches you can sift through – something for everyone and then some. I’m generally not a fan of these types of layouts without thumbnails or organization based on niche popularity, but I can understand its place here.
I feel like this section could really be cleaned up. For instance, do we really need a category for ‘Cuban’ with 4 videos in total? Chuck those in with the Latinas and it’s all good. Some niches here are useless owing to their vagueness too: ‘erotic hardcore’, ‘interesting’ and ‘mutiny’ – like, what?
Generally speaking, you’re getting a lot of vanilla porn here: all from pretty big studios in the VR space. Full archives aren’t always provided, but you’ll find scenes coming from the likes of VR Latina, Wankz VR, Cum In VR, Render Pleasure and 3D Pickup. Pretty much every major pornstar who’s ever done a virtual reality production has a release here. Names that you might be familiar with include Riley Reid, Vina Sky, Elsa Jean and Adriana Chechik.
Quite a few pornstars have over 100 scenes here: Melody Marks, Blake Blossom, Veronica Leal and Stacy Cruz. Plenty of others have dozens of releases for you to watch.
JAV Content
Sex Like Real has put a lot of effort into getting a decent chunk of VR content from Japan. From what I can tell, they actually came up with new technology to get around the censorship requirements that you find in JAV productions too – as much as I hate pixelated Asian pussy, it has to be done.
Around 25% of SLR’s content database is actually JAV: 6,850 videos as of the beginning of 2024. I’m a big fan of Asian porn in general and man – Japanese girls are my weakness – so I welcome this huge database of JAV VR material.
The censorship is tolerable, but owing to the nature of VR and its immersiveness – yeah, it really amplifies how much those laws suck. I noticed that some of the studios in this section of the site were also quite strategic with utilizing clothing and whatnot to minimize the need for pixelation. Good idea – more of that.
JAV VR tends to be a little more focused on the plot and foreplay – as well as making the most with binaural technology (expect lots of ear sucking, whispering and so on). There’s also around 1,000 videos in their ‘Japanese Idol’ section that have softcore, playful elements. Generally speaking, you won’t see penetration, but they do faux masturbation just out of the FOV, suck on lollypops and get changed into various cosplay outfits.
It seems like FANTASTICA is the studio behind all of these productions. Some truly gorgeous girls appear in these uploads: Sena Natsuki, Inori Minori, Chiaki Narumi and Yuka Nyan to name but a few.
The SLR App
Although the text makes it sound like a somewhat standalone app, Sex Like Real piggybacks off of a third-party project called DeoVR. That’s not a problem though: especially since it’s all but impossible to get an adult-related app approved by any of the stores. Generally speaking, VR apps aren’t required for porn sites, but there’s a good reason to grab DeoVR: it allows you to stream from SLR and enable passthrough.
Sex Like Real has made it possible for users to watch videos as if the girl they’re engaging with is in the room with them, thanks to passthrough technology. It’s best with high-end and modern VR devices because of color passthrough, but Meta Quest 2 can still do it – just note it’ll be monochrome.
Some scenes are shot with passthrough in mind, whereas others have been edited utilizing AI technology. There’s a complete breakdown of the feature available on the blog here: recommended reading if you want to know more about how things work under the hood and what’s planned for the future of SLR’s passthrough support and optimization.
I got to try out the passthrough videos, but it was only with a monochrome headset – Meta Quest 2. It’s not actually that bad, and it didn’t interfere with the realism of the environment. As the technology gets better and full color passthrough at high framerates is cheaper, I can see this becoming a dominant element of VR porn and what people look for as a priority. In terms of the technology, it does appear that SLR is way ahead of the competition.
Website Access in VR
Alongside the app, SLR also has a fully immersive website that your browser will prompt you to accept. Not every VR website has this, so it’s great that SLR does. All the bells and whistles are there and it seemed highly optimized for my device.
Taking good screenshots in VR is difficult, but you get the idea.
I like that they also include additional sidebar filters for various meta genres, so if you only want to see 8K, POV and so on – you can do that with ease. The only problem I found with the website was that if I went to the Japanese category, I was presented with Western-style videos that featured Japanese stars – not the original JAV scenes I spoke about in the content area.
Flicking the ‘Japanese / JAV’ filter didn’t seem to do anything. Not sure what’s going on there, but it might just be a user issue.
Design & Navigation
You’d expect the desktop utility here to be better than the standalone app and the website: that’s certainly the case, and it will always be my preferred way to look for scenes. I like the fact that you can organize scenes based on popularity and upload date: this is also something you can do for each category, so if you want the latest amateur uploads or the most popular ebony scenes, it’s very easy to do.
Sadly, it’s not possible to search for two niches at the same time, so if you want to see group sex uploads with Latinas, you cannot do that easily. This is usually okay with smaller size platforms, but multi-niche search when you’ve got tens of thousands of videos is really quite important to have. The search box is fantastic though: great design and features. Check it out:
This updates in real time, so just punch in whatever you’re looking for and it will spit out results. This is also good if you only know part of the name of a pornstar you like watching. I’m not sure if the playlists are user generated or official, but given the names and their correct grammar/structure, I’m going to go with official for now.
Sex Like Real has a fully fledged meta information area for details regarding the pornstars featured, various tags, extensive download options, extra photographs and a few other cool things. You can save videos to your favorites or add them to a playlist. There’s a comment section where feedback can be provided: users here love to talk about the videos and the team seems to pay attention.
Other Features
SLR is feature rich: I’d argue it has more on offer here into terms of gadgets and gizmos than any other virtual reality porn destination I’ve checked out.
It’s difficult to know how much to mention, since so many of these features will have only niche appeal.
Just to quickly run past some extras: you’ve got a great Discord server here with direct access to a support team and a place to give suggestions, an interactive section for videos where you control some of the action, optional scripts (both manually created and AI assisted) for sex toys, a pornstar database to find scenes from your favorite girls and so on.
Sex Like Real is a fully fledged website that goes above and beyond to deliver accessibility and features.
I want to mention that currently, you do get free credits if you sign up for a monthly rebill that you can spend on VR shows. I did some digging and it seems to be an embedded affiliate setup with Strip Cams. The great news is: Strip Cams is our #1 highest rated live sex platform, and we recently reviewed two dozen of the best spots out there to come to that conclusion.
If you’d like to know more about Strip Chat, read our full review here. Note that the VR cams are embedded in the website itself – it’s not just a link to a third-party hub. They also seem to handle the billing, so this is a little more than just an extra grab for cash. It’s not the mainstay of their project, but if you like the idea of VR sex cams – SLR makes that a reality.
Billing Information
Different deals appear to be available at different times. When I visited, I was able to get a recurring monthly subscription for $19.99, a one-time 30-day membership for $32.99, annual access for $122.99 and a lifetime account for $449.99. The only thing that these memberships lack that you can pay extra for are the sex toy scripts – if you don’t have a dick device, you don’t need to worry about this.
There are a large number of billing options: SLR actually has a huge number of fallback processors in case your card doesn’t work with a particular provider. I encountered 4 options: Epoch, Verotel, Shift4 and TrustPay. Epoch and Verotel both wanted to handle the currency exchange for me (AUD to USD), so I opted for Shift4, since my bank (Wise) offers me a better rate. TrustPay also charges you in USD, regardless of where you are.
Alongside credit and debit card support, SLR allows you to pay for your membership with cryptocurrency. Support is available for BTC, ETH, ADA, BNB, LTC, TRX, DOGE and USDT. I was quoted 0.109558 BNB: this came out to exactly $33, so you’re not paying a premium for settling with cryptocurrency. Just remember the transfer fee, so TRX, DOGE, LTC and BNB are my go-to recommendations.
How Will Sex Like Real Purchases Appear on My Statement?
Here’s how my bank reported my Sex Like Real subscription:
You can try and Google those three letters with phrases like ‘credit card statement’ and ‘billing code’, but you’ll get nothing. I think it’s fair to say that SLR’s billing is fully discreet.
Downsides of Sex Like Real
In the interests of balance, let’s talk about things I didn’t like with regard to SLR. Firstly: not all of the videos are able to be downloaded – some of the JAV productions are stream only. It’s only a fraction of the total database, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. According to SLR, producers in Japan request that their videos are stream only – so they comply, as much as they dislike it. Oh, and on the topic of downloads: I think that the limits are a little harsh – they should bump their numbers to 100 scenes per week instead of 30 per 6 days.
Not being able to select multiple niches at the same time kinda sucks, as does the inability for me to find JAV scenes via the website (the app worked fine, though). You’ll also have to pay extra for scripts, which I get – but I’m generally a fan of everything being thrown in with a membership no matter what.
I appreciate that these are pretty minor concerns, but it’s the best I can come up with with regard to what SLR could do better.
Our Verdict on Sex Like Real
I try to be balanced with my reviews and unless a place hits it out of the park, exercise caution with my recommendations. With regard to SLR – I’m so confident that the average VR porn fan is going to have an incredible time here, I have little reason to hold back from saying exactly that.
You’ve got a huge quantity of videos, dozens of new daily releases, plenty of cool extra features, VR sex cams, passthrough technology, good download speeds, unlimited streaming access and more. The fact of the matter is that if you’re not satisfied with your experience at Sex Like Real, it’s highly unlikely that any other destination is going to do a better job.
The bottom line is that Sex Like Real is a stellar provider of VR porn: sign up for a month and you’ll see for yourself just how great it is.
