In 1970 the American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler used the term “future shock” to describe the disorienting effects of accelerating technological change. But is there an antonym for future shock – a term that describes the opposite condition, capturing how it feels to be confronted with a technological breakthrough and to be underwhelmed by it? “Future shrug”, perhaps.

I had a bad case of future shrug as a teenager in the early 1990s, on an expedition to the cyberpunk kindergarten that was the Trocadero Centre in London to try out the first generation of virtual reality (VR) headsets. Two minutes of jerky, flickery, motionless “flight”. Was that it? Even the few exercises in Hollywood utopianism that accompanied VR’s first outing were curiously underpowered.

Take, for instance, The Lawnmower Man (1992), in which a scientist played by Pierce Brosnan uses VR to massively boost the intelligence of the simple fellow who cuts his grass. The leisure options offered by Brosnan’s home VR rig are laughably limited: floating, flying, falling. Brosnan’s wife, after finding him trying out a private leisure activity in the rig, acidly suggests he adds another f-word to the list. But that doesn’t just look unappealing, it’s actively ridiculous: a lot of thin-air groping, like a pervy mimeshow: floating, flying, falling … fumbling.

Now VR is back, chiefly in the form of the Facebook-backed Oculus Rift headset, originally slated for release this year but currently delayed; Samsung, Sony, HTC and others are also working on systems. Naturally, it’s time to consider the potential for that fourth F – primarily for the innocent reason that the “adult entertainment industry” has the economic heft and, let’s say, specialist consumer appeal that is believed to have driven uptake of media technologies such as home video.

What if VR could enable different, more original, less exploitative forms of sensory transgression? To avoid that “fondling empty space” feeling, virtual reality sex would need some physical-reality plug-ins (for want of a better word). There are now a small number of companies specialising in “teledildonics”, as the field of networked sex toys is called. For instance Kiiroo, founded last year, and Lovense both sell Bluetooth-enabled vibrators and “fleshlight”-style vibrating sheaths, enabling some level of long-distance erotic interaction, either with both partners tooled up, or with one remotely controlling the other’s device – like one of those thermostat apps, but for the private parts of your significant other.

But what of the “virtual reality” side? With teledildonics still very basic, VR sex is really little more than VR pornography, and here the industry runs into a problem. Porn is already extremely efficient: widely available for free, infamously easy to access, not very difficult to consume. VR porn would have to offer an improvement over those advantages, and comes with significant disadvantages, chiefly in how difficult it is to make, necessitating expensive and untested custom equipment. And that’s pre-recorded experiences: “live” telepresence presents colossal technological obstacles. It's hard enough to generate realistic virtual presence in an environment as basic as a meeting room – getting into a camgirl’s room in any meaningful way is a long way off.

Furthermore – unsurprisingly, given the topic – there’s an ethical question. Does the porn experience truly need to be more immersive? The VR porn being trialled at present has the viewer acting as participant in a sex act, rather than being simply a passive observer. There’s a significant subgenre within pornography aimed at producing this illusion, known as “POV” or “gonzo” porn, and it tends to be firmly on the darker side of the porn spectrum. Often it portrays the women involved in more humiliating ways, suggesting that the fantasy it is best suited to serving is one of asymmetrical power and degradation rather than more straightforward erotic pleasure.

But what if VR could enable different, more original, less exploitative forms of sensory transgression? That is, an experience beyond the usual pleasuring of the flesh – broadening “porn” into interesting artistic areas? It’s conceivable that its lack of tangible feedback – the air-grope problem – could even be turned into an advantage. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, have recently shown that a VR rig can be used to simulate the sensation of invisibility. A subject wearing a VR headset is poked with a paintbrush, but what they see through their goggles is empty space being “poked”. This is enough to trick the subject into imagining that they have disappeared – which, in turn, makes them feel less anxious about their space being invaded.

There are obvious uses for this; for instance, helping people feel at ease during invasive medical procedures. But could it also point the way towards more creative forms of home titillation? Invisibility and intangibility are centuries-old fantasies, tied closely in with that most 21st-century kink: voyeurism. Could a future joy of the flesh be its own evanescence? It’s pleasing, if naïve, to imagine that VR could enable vast new fields of erotic roleplay, the thrill of seeing the world through the eyes of another. Imagine, for instance, virtual transvestitism; a new world of sympathetic, empathetic sensuality.