Peter Rubin, senior editor for WIRED and the industry’s go-to authority on the intersection of popular culture and virtual reality, argues that this new technology will powerfully transform how we experience intimacy. While we once needed another person to feel the sensations of closeness, trust, vulnerability, confidence, and titillation, VR will give us the ability to induce these sensations by ourselves for the first time in human history. This metamorphosis, Rubin explains, is going to have a powerful impact on relationships that will ripple throughout our society and our individual lives.

By taking us on a journey spanning universities, tech companies, and porn studios, Rubin explores a host of complex questions about what makes us human, what connects us, and what is real. At once the incredible, inevitable story of virtual reality’s rise and a look toward the future of our fantasies, Future Presence is ultimately a deeply personal analysis of what relationships, empathy, and sex could look like—sooner than we think.