I’m standing in Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, struggling to get my bearings. A group of Marines huddles in front of me, but I can’t quite hear what they’re saying, so I turn around and look for something more interesting. All I find is a pile of chairs and other junk. I wonder what it’s doing there. And that’s when I hear the gun shots.

In reality, I’m in Manhattan, sitting in a comfortable black office chair with headphones on and a virtual reality simulator called the Oculus Rift strapped to my face like a pair of ski goggles. But I still feel a real sense of danger as I spin my chair to look for the shots’ source.

And that is exactly the point.

Danfung Dennis

The creator of this video is Danfung Dennis, who is best known for Hell and Back Again, a film he directed about the war in Afghanistan. Dennis was inspired by war photographers like Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut, whose famous photograph of children running away from their burning village after a napalm attack seared an image of the war’s cost into the minds of Americans. But even as Dennis’s own footage from a far-off war was nominated for an Oscar, he didn’t feel that it had accomplished what he wanted it to. “I wanted people to witness it first hand,” he says. “I wanted to bring people into the story and let them see it. I maybe naively believed that images could change the world. It’s not like [the “napalm girl”] image hasn’t been taken in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s been taken so many times that it no longer has any impact on how we react to war. It’s so abstract, it’s so far away, so distant.”

It’s what might happen if a documentary about virtual reality were crossed with the Matrix.

His frustration bred an obsession with immersive video. Four years ago, he started a company called Condition One that built technology to play 180-degree videos on the iPad and iPhone. If viewers moved their phones to the right, they would see what someone inside the scene would see if she turned her head to the right. Meanwhile, the company Oculus VR created a headset that costs $300, giving virtual reality the potential to expand to the masses (such headsets previously cost tens of thousands of dollars are were primarily used for military simulations). Condition One pivoted and started working on a virtual reality short film called Zero Point. The footage I’m watching is from that film.

Zero Point, Dennis says, will explore the world of virtual reality using scenes not only from Camp Pendleton, but also from the trade floor of the E3 video game convention in Los Angeles, and from an animated version of the international space station. It is not about war, but it’s part of an effort to establish a medium that Dennis thinks could more accurately portray it. Condition One used a 360-degree, 3-D camera set-up to capture the footage and created a video engine that could stitch together all of those viewpoints–every angle, plus a separate camera for left- and right-eye views–into a seamless virtual reality environment.

The short film is due out this spring for developers (the consumer version of the Oculus Rift has not yet been released). In it, there will be interviews with virtual reality experts from Stanford and USC, independent game developers, and the founder of Oculus VR (Dennis describes Oculus VR as a “partner” in the film, but says it didn’t provide funding). There will be a fictional dystopian storyline about where virtual reality could lead if people start spending all of their time in it. And all of this will take place in different corners of the space station, a solution that Dennis developed to avoid the abrupt cut.