What a headset needs before a bondage scene is worth watching in it, in plain terms.
Presence is resolution plus stereo, not one of the two
A high-resolution flat video in a virtual cinema is still a screen. A low-resolution stereo file is
convincing for about ten seconds and then reads as cardboard. Both halves have to be there: two eye images
with real parallax, and enough pixels per eye that rope, skin and knots still have texture when the picture
is stretched across your field of view.
The formats you will see named
VR180 covers the half-sphere in front of you and is what most of this material is filmed in. VR360 covers
everything, which sounds better and mostly means the camera crew had to hide. Side-by-side (SBS) and
over-under describe how the two eye images are packed into one file; a player needs to be told which, and
most read it from the filename or the metadata.
Players
DeoVR, Skybox, Pigasus and HereSphere all handle VR180-SBS on Quest and Pico, and the same names exist for
PC headsets. If a shop hands you a plain MP4, any of them will open it from local storage.
Comfort, which is a real constraint here
Scenes with a fixed camera and a subject that stays roughly in place are the comfortable ones — which
happens to describe most restraint scenes. Handheld VR is where people get ill. If a preview shows the
camera moving, that is worth knowing before a twenty-minute title.