Never Tried Virtual Reality? Here's What It's Like

It doesn’t take a high-tech headset to see that virtual reality is the rage. It’s being touted as the future for all things sensory, from games to film and television, from storytelling to visual art.

My response as a television critic - and as a dyed-in-the-wool TV viewer - is to ask what this all means to me.

I am not typically an early adopter. My beat as a journalist isn’t newfangled gadgetry. I’m a TV-centric content guy, scrambling to keep up with the torrent of programs that, however more plentiful and varied their providers, still contain themselves in two dimensions.

Even so, VR seems a force to be reckoned with. So I grabbed a Samsung Gear VR headset for a maiden voyage.

Virtual reality is the link to an alternate reality, and instantly I’m all in! For example, I find that a wooded, birds-twittering forest on a sunny day is a far more agreeable environment than my stuffy apartment. And that’s even before Reese Witherspoon appears over a rise and, puffing with her backpack, rests herself on a nearby rock.

In character from her 2014 film “Wild,” she is bedraggled but radiant and seems close enough and real enough to bother for a sip of her water. Alas, all too quickly Witherspoon resumes her solitary trek, vanishing through trees in the opposite direction too absorbed in her odyssey to have paid me any notice.