Virtual Reality: The Wearable Movie?

Depending on whom you ask, virtual reality is either a world-changing force for empathy, the best videogame platform ever, or a weird thing you put on your face. But V.R.—the technology that allows a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree immersive sensory experience—is still finding its stride as a medium. The staff writer Andrew Marantz went looking for the Orson Welles of V.R. and found one group of artists and technologists whose project, “Blackout,” may point in the right direction.