Virtual Taboo promises punters ‘VR porn videos with a sexy twist’: their tour pitch claims that once inside, you’ll get access to 3 weekly updates, 7K content, exclusive releases and incredible action from some of the best pornstars around.
What’s more, their niche of choice is all things taboo: incest, wife swapping, cheating and beyond.
My research suggests that Virtual Taboo was an early adopter of VR technology – did their first mover advantage become knowledge, expertise and domination in the VR porn content creation space? There’s a great way to find out: giving this hub a full, professional review.
I’m armed with a Meta Quest 2 and a credit card: what’s the premium membership deal like here at Virtual Taboo? I’m excited to be able to put this website to the test to see how it stacks up against the competition. Here’s my full Virtual Taboo review!
Virtual Taboo Review: First Impressions
Virtual Taboo has picked up exactly one award since its inception: the XBIZ EU award in 2020 for ‘Virtual Reality Site of the Year’.
They’ve got a Twitter account with over 60,000 followers that was created in March of 2015: turns out that this is when the platform first started putting scenes online too: very early days!
In terms of innovation, Virtual Taboo was one of the first hubs to adopt 7K as a standard in April of 2020 – I checked in with Wankz VR and back then, 6K was their top-end format. They also switched to 10-bit color with their resolution upgrade. 8-bit is fine, but there’s a discernable difference between VR content shot in 8-bit vs. 10-bit.
The website’s tour provides 2-minute trailers for each scene, so if you want to sample the wares before grabbing an account, it’s easy to do so. You can stream and download these samples in a variety of resolutions too, ranging from 960p all the way up to 7K.
It’s technically possible to buy singular scenes from Virtual Taboo, but they’re $9.99 each. I don’t think this is stellar value for money, so I’m going to approach this review from the perspective of someone paying for a premium subscription. Here are the signup options:
1 month for $29.99, 3 months for $59.99 and a year for $99.99. If you’re feeling committed, you can get the lifetime account option for $250. Non-VR porn destinations rarely have lifetime memberships, but in the virtual reality space, it’s actually quite common.
From time to time, Virtual Taboo will run various discount offers and membership deals. I grabbed a Valentine’s Day deal which meant I got 1 month of access for $14.99 – bargain. Don’t expect to get these offers all the time and when they are there, take full advantage before it’s too late.
The Virtual Taboo Member’s Area
Signing up was quick and painless: took about 30 seconds to put my details in, register for a month and be automatically transferred through to the member’s area.
Scenes are then presented to you chronologically: updates are provided on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, so the tour’s promise of 3 new weekly updates was accurate.
Here’s how scenes at Virtual Taboo are presented to you: very different to tube-style thumbnails on larger index pages. Truth be told, I think that having to scroll down for each new scene preview is a bit of a pain.
If they had a smaller archive – no issue – but I’ve only been here for a few minutes and I’m already feeling the pain of this approach to displaying content. I looked around and there doesn’t appear to be any way to switch to a more traditional layout – sucks.
Virtual Taboo is pretty feature lite. There is a section for the best scenes though, and you can organize these based on specific years, for the last month or of all time. There’s a comment section for each upload and some have well over 100. If you have a particular preference for a release, hit the ‘favorite’ button and it’ll be saved to a playlist for easy future access.
There are adverts in the member’s area: these are for rival platforms and in some instances, we’ve covered places they’ve got adverts for. Be sure to have a read of my analysis on VR Bangers and Virtual Real Porn if you feel like clicking the ads: I’ll give you the inside scoop!
The ads are pretty inoffensive and don’t get in the way of the browsing experience. I’m okay with a small amount of upselling – Virtual Taboo doesn’t cross the line.
You’ll find areas here for tags and pornstars, as well as a search feature. Outside of those, that’s pretty much all that Virtual Taboo brings to the table. Not off to a bad start, but how about we fire up the headset and see how the porn goes?
Video Analysis
Quantity
As of mid-February 2024, Virtual Taboo’s archive consists of 1048 uploads. These appear to be 100% exclusive to the platform and with 3 weekly releases, you can expect 156 fresh drops to be added here each and every year. Virtual Taboo has been incredibly consistent with hitting this upload frequency, so I have no reason to believe that as time goes on, they won’t stick to it.
Virtual Taboo’s closest rivals are Wankz VR and VR Bangers. Wankz VR has a collection of 825 scenes, whereas VR VR Bangers is sitting on 780. These numbers are pretty close, but a clear advantage to Virtual Taboo: in terms of single-release studio figures, this is one of, if not the, biggest archive currently available.
With regard to length, two prominent types of scene exist: spectator and hardcore. If a dick (or two) are involved, you’ll find that the videos are between 30 to 45 minutes in length on average. When it’s spectator stuff – solo masturbation and girls teasing one another – scenes are much shorter, around 10 to 20 minutes. There have been some extremely long releases though – last month, an 85-minute group sex was uploaded.
Quality
I went way back in time to the very first uploads here and man – has the objective quality improved since then! From 2020 onward, scenes have always been released in 7K as their top-end resolution, but back in 2015, 1080p with a 11.5 Mb/s bitrate was the dominant format – with a 50 FPS framerate, no less. I asked about potential remasters but sadly, the source files have long since gone. Oh well!
Here are some objective metrics from a recent upload, 4K and 7K examples:
4K clocks in at 30.6 Mb/s, with 7K running 39.4 Mb/s. There are 6K and 5K options available – all of the non-7K options have the same approximate file size, so it would appear that Virtual Taboo has a target with their rendering software and it varies the bitrate in each video to make it match. A recent 1 hour scene weighed in at 18.3 GB for the 7K and 13.7 GB for everything else. These are hefty files!
Download Speed
It’s pretty important for websites to offer decent download speeds in the VR space: Virtual Taboo was acceptable, but far from being the best. I averaged between 35 MB/s and 50 MB/s for a single file: practically speaking, most readers won’t have connections capable of this speed. However, top performing rival platforms can go up to 110 MB/s and beyond with my network, so Virtual Taboo does lag behind slightly.
You can use a download manager and better yet, parallel downloads are supported. The good news is that parallel downloads don’t appear to share the same bandwidth restriction, so if I grab 3 different VR scenes at the same time, I can completely saturate by gigabit connection.
Virtual Taboo’s tour promises unlimited downloads and I found nothing in their legal documentation that runs contrary to this. Other sites do carry limits, so the fact there are none here is great.
Content Analysis
As the site name suggests, taboo is the name of the game here. Each scene has a particular theme that’s explored in the first few minutes.
Incest is a major storyline in a lot of the scenes, but you’ve also got babysitter fantasies, banging exchange students, stranger sex and so on. Truth be told, I think that the taboo theme here is a little undersold – some scenes are just your girlfriend putting on a French maid outfit, or having a one night stand with a girl from a conservative family.
The action is very much vanilla, there are a few scenes with semi-kinky ideas, but the underlying material is always going to be relevant to the interests of most porn fans who like to keep things simple. I think this sample image from a scene I found really sums it up:
Ball gags are definitely in the kinky space, but like, it’s around your neck instead of in your mouth – that’s not how it works! If you want BDSM, rough sex and other extreme themes in your taboo porn – I’ll level with you, you’re not going to find it here. Nothing wrong with run-of-the-mill porn, but I want to make it clear that this place has quite a tame definition of the word ‘taboo’.
In terms of ethnic breakdown, you’ll find 29 Asian, 19 Latina and just 7 ebony scenes. Considering that Wankz VR has 96 Latina videos in its 825 scene library and VR Bangers offers 66 ebony uploads out of 780 videos – there’s a very clear bias here away from ethnically diverse performers.
Virtual Taboo would be much, much better if they recruited more exotic women to star in their scenes.
Design & Navigation
Desktop
The design ought to be switched to one that makes it a lot easier for you to look through scenes quickly. With 1,000+ uploads now, 6 per page that requires you to scroll a lot just doesn’t cut the mustard. At the very least, it should be optional, with a tried-and-tested tube-style layout being the backup option (I think 90% of people would prefer it over the current design).
Tag navigation works just fine, although I would like for it to be possible to pick multiple at the same time. Right now, you’re limited to just one, so if you want to find threesome scenes with Asian girls, you have to manually look through either the Asian or threesome category. You can sort based on upload date or rating though, so that’s good.
Scenes have a detailed description, lots of associated tags, preview images and a huge number of download options. You can leave comments here and even reply to others. The team at Virtual Taboo take on feedback and respond to most questions. In total, they’ve posted over 6,000 comments across their uploads.
VR Headset
The website in VR is a carbon copy of the desktop version: it works just fine, but all the issues I mentioned above apply here as well. There is no immersive mode as a browsing option, but videos will prompt you to go full-screen so you can stream the scenes just as you would anywhere else. They have some type of immersive functionality too, given that there are suggested scenes below whichever one you’re watching.
There was nothing remarkable about accessing this platform in VR, but nothing missing either. Perhaps the best thing was the average loading speed and lack of buffering.
When I fast-forwarded through scenes, it took less than a second to play. Far more responsive than most platforms I’ve reviewed. Sadly, if you’re accessing with a PSVR headset, you won’t be able to stream from Virtual Taboo: instead, you need to grab an app called Littlestar. Other headsets can use Gizmo VR if they want, but with my Meta Quest 2, it made the most sense to just run it straight from the browser.
You can sample scenes from Virtual Taboo without creating an account. The trailers are two minutes long and at a 7K resolution, so you’ll get a good sense of what the scenes are like and what will be available inside. Streaming and downloading are both available on headsets when visiting the tour.
Mobile
Support for smart phone VR devices is available – same with the above, you can sample scenes here without creating an account. The mobile website is speedy and functions just like the desktop version does. The major issue is that the same design has been adopted, and it’s even worse since there are so many tags shown on the main archive pages.
It’s okay, it works – but just don’t bother showing the tags, stick to one preview image and tidy up the rest of the display so a lot less screen real estate is required for each scene. Scrolling down on mobile devices can suck at the best of times – it’s even worse when you have to do it repeatedly with your non-dominant hand.
Billing Information
You can buy singular scenes for $9.99, unless you’ve got a findom fetish where you get off on really bad offers and wasting your money, don’t bother with this. Typical prices are 1 month for $29.99, 3 months for $59.99 and 12 months for $99.99. Deals come along every so often – I got in for a lot less than the standard rate for my review.
You can also get lifetime access at a price of $250. If you’re going to stick around for 3 years or more – might be worth considering.
You can pay with a credit or debit card, PayPal or direct debit/SEPA if you’re in Europe. Epoch manage the payment and they automatically convert the cost into your local currency – but take a cut for doing so. I dislike this, but since it’s less than a dollar, I won’t cry too much.
I’d like to see Virtual Taboo embrace cryptocurrency. I think people realize it’s not a meme, and offering people the ability to pay with LTC, XRP, ETH, BNB and so on would be great. I’ve paid for porn before with cryptocurrency – plenty of rival VR websites also offer it.
How Will Virtual Taboo Purchases Appear on My Statement?
Here’s what my bank told me when I subscribed to Virtual Taboo:
I did a little sleuthing with Google and found no results for this particular keyword. A few Quora threads will come up for Epoch and they tend to mention adult entertainment, but it’s obscure enough that someone could feign ignorance and be given the benefit of the doubt. I’d describe Virtual Taboo’s billing as fully discreet.
Downsides of Virtual Taboo
I’ve mentioned issues with the design and navigation throughout this review, so I’m not going to rehash those points in detail, but a fresh layout with a focus on accessibility would really improve things here. Virtual Taboo is no longer a small-scale platform – they need to realize that sifting through 1,000+ uploads isn’t easy.
There are no major red flags. I did notice a few things that annoyed me, though. Firstly: there’s a lack of ethnic diversity here, and I want to see more Latinas, more Asians and more black goddesses.
Virtual Taboo works with European girls quite a lot, which is a nice touch – but bring on the exotic beauties. Virtual Taboo also has no convenient way to cancel your recurring billing: you have to do it via Epoch and yeah, it takes a few minutes to do that.
There was also a small security issue: I was sent my password in plain text when signing up. Don’t reuse passwords as a general rule, but definitely don’t reuse them here – if Virtual Taboo is storing passwords in plain text, that’s a pretty big issue that could be exploited.
My Verdict on Virtual Taboo
When all is said and done, Virtual Taboo comes out ahead of a lot of its peers – purely in the space of VR studios that deliver exclusive content. Subjectively, I had a great time here, and I think that they create quality scenes that look fantastic and leave little, if nothing, to be desired.
That said, definite improvements can be made here. It’s a little sad they cannot remaster old scenes, but since they were amongst the first to adopt 7K as a standard, so many of their uploads are top tier anyway.
The overwhelming issue is the design – but if we just look at the content, Virtual Taboo is hard to beat. They’ve worked with some stellar names over the years too: Eva Elfie, Shalina Devine, Melody Marks and Luna Roulette all have scenes here for you to watch.
My advice is to sample the tour videos and if you like what you see, grab a month. If you realize that this is the spot for you, a yearly membership – or even a lifetime account – do make great economic sense.
Virtual Taboo is a great project and I’m sure they’ll continue to create more world-class VR porn for many years to come.
