Las Vegas- Every year as the world’s largest gadget show cools off, the exhibition hall merely feet away heats up with the combined power of porn purveyors, the starlets they feature and the lustful gazes of the fans that line up to see them at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.

Half Renaissance fair (read: a lot of bizarre costumes and exposed cleavage), half sex shop on steroids, the show attracted seemingly thousands of men Thursday, just 30 minutes after the doors opened. As the distinct scent of marijuana smoke wafted through the air, fans mingled with industry veterans, lining up for photos and autographs in a snakey maze of giant booths devoted to the lucrative art of selling sex — or at least sexual fantasy.

For Terri Ann Daniels, an executive assistant and model at AbbyWinters.com, an Australian site with a primarily American audience, her first visit to the show was a somewhat surprising one.

Shocked by the crowds that gathered at her company’s booth — “we’re amazed at how popular we are” — Daniels was even more surprised by the coverage; the company showed up on a popular blog within 19 minutes of the show’s limited opening earlier this week.

“Since most of the market is in the U.S., we wanted to build up our market in the industry,” Daniels said after she and nine of the site’s models did a yoga show in a large fake-grass-lined booth in their bras and underwear. “This is the best place to start off.”

Although Daniels’ booth was noticeable — a large green space carved out in the middle of a show floor inked from floor to ceiling primarily in neon colors — it paled in comparison to the presence of porn behemoths like Vivid Entertainment and Hustler Home Video, which featured multiple porn stars, an occasional mainstream celebrity (Dave Navarro was expected to appear) and various shades of hot pink, red and black.

But the Consumer Electronics Show and the expo don’t just share convention space, they also share a similar audience — one that is young and male. CES attendees lined the show’s entranceway with cameras in hand, hoping to catch a shot of the bevy of scantily clad women who passed. At the same time, security guards pushed away voyeurs who got too close or lingered too long.

James and Joshua Ready, two brothers from Seattle who also attended CES, said attending the porn show was more about the scene — cute girls in wild costumes — than the industry.

“We really just come for the fun,” James Ready, 26, said after posing in a photo with a well-endowed woman that he said he thought was cute. “[It’s] basically girls and fun.”

Joshua Ready, an amateur photographer, said he came because of the great photos he can get in the circuslike atmosphere.

In addition to audience, the two shows also share a desire to push technological boundaries.

“It’s fascinating some of the technology they’ve got. People don’t realize the kind of work that goes into that space,” said Rob Enderle, a technology analyst at the Enderle Group, in a phone interview. “They probably have some of the most advanced work in virtual reality.”

One company that’s taking a mainstream technology trend and applying it to adult entertainment is FyreTV.com.

This month, FyreTV will offer a set-top box that, like Vudu, will offer thousands of different movies. The difference is that instead of offering mainstream entertainment, the FyreTV box features porn.

“It started out of necessity,” said the company’s founder, Estefano Isaias. “We noticed that this market had not been exploited yet and we wanted to get in and be the first guys in there with a good product.”

The company’s set-top box features more than 20,000 titles that are searchable by star, genre and title. Payment models include monthly payments for a certain amount of minutes or payment per movie. Movies can be watched for the lifetime of the box.

Though still an emerging technology, companies are looking to set-top boxes more and more as a means to distribute entertainment. Earlier this month, LG announced that it would produce a box that would stream Netflix movies.

“Obviously, there’s some level of competition, but the market is so new and so virgin that I think everyone is doing their part to expand the market,” Isaias said. “It’s the exact same technology [as Vudu]. It’s incredible. We just happened to go into different markets at the exact same time with the exact same technology.”

Even as the market expands, FyreTV is the first to apply the set-top box concept to the porn industry.

“The problem with content-specific boxes historically is that you can’t get enough people to buy in a geographic area to make it worthwhile,” Enderle said. “But this can work. … Nobody else has [it] and none of the cable boxes want to touch that.”