This week The Booze News sat down with Brian Shuster, CEO of RedLightCenter.com and Virtual-Vancouver.com, two online social networks aimed at the adult crowd. Yes, that means you can have virtual sex in them.

TBN: In your own words, describe your sites.
Brian: It’s the next generation of the web, imagining it in three dimensions. I would describe it as a real-life videogame meets the web, meets commercial networking. More specifically, they are social networking sites that serves as a range of needs. The most apparent one is as a place for people to meet, socialize and engage in social activities.

TBN: Because your site is adult in nature, people who do similar things than you, but that are less adult-oriented, have broader success. How do you shed the image of just being another porn site?

Brian: I think it’s going to happen naturally in many different ways. We don’t characterize it as an isolated site; we look at it as the next iteration of the web. Instead of people creating flat websites, we offer a 3D world. The internet was, and to an extent still is, mockingly depicted as just a porn delivery mechanism. We’re fighting a similar battle.

TBN: You’ve received a lot of criticism for being able to do virtual drugs on your websites. The criticism seems unfair when any sane observer can see any 12-year-old killing random people in any online game. What’s your take?

Brian: (laughs) Yeah, I think it’s preposterous. The whole thing is in good fun.

TBN: In this virtual world, how much control do you have over the physical appearance of your character?

Brian: You have control over their gender, height, size, ethnicity, face, tattoos and piercings, and dress. It’s pretty flexible.

TBN: So is that virtual world just a bunch of tall, handsome men and big-tittied blondes walking around?

Brian: People tend to be truer to themselves. I think that says a lot about the environment, it shows that we’re not so much a game as a new type of the internet where people want to build real interactions.

TBN: What does your site offer the typical college student, someone who can go out and get drunk, do drugs, and get laid more or less at will?

Brian: It’s a wonderful place to experiment much more freely. College is a great place to try things out, but there is a much greater risk with a much greater overhead. In this virtual world you can try things out with less consequence. From the sex standpoint, for example, someone can figure out what they like or don’t like.

TBN: What kind of non-standard sexual experiences are available?

Brian: People can experiment with everything from bisexuality to group sex to drug-induced whips and chains, giant sex toy parties. Lots of boundaries people can push.

TBN: So what lies ahead for your website?

Brian: Well, what’s going to happen here is we’re going to let third-party groups to come in and plug in their programs into our universe. Within five years I think we’re going to see the internet shift into being a library-like service that is accessed through virtual worlds like the one we’ve set up.