The quality of the image was abysmal when streaming. It improved once I downloaded the videos, but still looked like a 720p YouTube clip at best. Despite the sometimes pixelated and blurry visual, I had to catch my breath while flying over New York City, or splashing in waves next to emerald blue ice floes, or bathing beside an elephant in a reedy swamp. When I showed an episode to my wife, she squeezed my hand in fear and refused to let go as a school of very hungry sharks encircled her. After watching her and my 65-year-old father stretch their arms out while enjoying a video shot from a helicopter flying over Iceland, I tried the same and was rewarded with a much stronger physical and emotional reaction to the imagery.

Like almost all mobile VR headsets, this one is low resolution enough to have a slight "screen door" effect. I often noticed the edges of the lens and interior of the headset, bits of light creeping in from outside or reflecting brightly off the lenses — little things that prevented the image from being totally immersive. But a good VR film more than made up for these shortcomings. My last 360-degree film was the award-winning Inside the Box of Kurious, a recording of a Cirque du Soleil performance. And it was fantastic, frightening, and unique. Watching it felt like staring through a very thin veil, but the blurriness didn’t stop me from feeling as though I was standing beside real human beings, taking center stage in a surreal circus.

Reading terms of service in virtual reality is a special circle of hell

Of course, to get that experience, I had to download the film. While it’s easy enough to navigate and browse inside the Gear VR, there is something incredibly dehumanizing about watching a download bar tick by while trapped in a virtual living room, or worse, an endless black void. And being asked to read through a 69-page terms of service agreement inside a VR environment… well, that felt like its own special circle of hell.

After the 360-degree videos, I tried out a couple of 2D flicks in Samsung’s immersive VR theater. It was one of those funny moments where the most banal parts of the environment became completely entrancing: the empty rows of seats around me, the red carpet, the flickering shadows. One of my strongest moments of "presence" was turning to inspect the chair to my right. When I moved toward it and felt nothing, my mind stumbled to understand the empty space where a solid object was supposed to be. That said, I’m not sure the experience would have been less interesting on a nice TV, where I could see my wife sitting next to me — or the popcorn bowl in front of me.