Rich Zahradnik

I didn’t get my jet car. I didn’t get my hover board. But the virtual reality I was promised way back in the nineties is finally here. I trace that particular techno-promise to the third or fourth issue of Wired magazine, which put dreadlocked VR guru Jaron Lanier on its cover. He was wearing a VR rig that looked something like a welder’s mask. And a big ski glove. He promised a totally immersive, massively available VR experience coming to my face mask soon.

Never happened. Tossed on the pile with the flying car and the hover board. Oh yeah, and the jet pack.

A couple of weeks ago, legacy (irony) media outlet the New York Times, delivered with my Sunday paper Google Cardboard (killer brand name, that). This flat thing looked like a Trick-or-Treat-for-Unicef box before you put it together, just with thicker walls. When I folded it all up, flat cardboard (not brand name) turned into something like a squared-off Viewmaster, but one that uses a smartphone as the media player, rather than round discs with little pictures on them. I downloaded the NYT VR app and Velcroed in my iPhone. The first film I watched was on three refugee children surviving in three war-torn countries. The second, “Vigils in Paris,” presented Parisians visiting different memorial sites after the terror attacks and talking about what happened.

The low-cost, hybrid approach leveraging my own phone delivered. Seriously. In each film, I was immersed in the experience. Not because it was 3-D—it wasn’t—but because of the 360-degree view I got of the refugees’ worlds and of the memorials and the people honoring the dead. While one of the refugee kids was talking, I could watch him, or I could turn 180 and see where the little canoe was heading. Same with the vigils. One man was singing, and I was checking out the rest of the crowd, the flowers, the candles, and cards and the statue towering over us (yes us).

Lesson to me is that immersion is not about 3-D, it’s about believing you’re standing in the middle of the world filmed. Pretty cool that everyone’s smartphone is a VR device. Just add cardboard (love that branding!).

If you threw your Google Cardboard away when it came with your Times, go dig it out.