Whether it intends to be or not, the Sundance Film Festival can feel a bit exclusive. Nestled in a posh ski town in Utah, the bulk of the people who get to experience its wonders are monied Hollywood types (and the less-monied reporters who cover them). But this year, a lot more people will get to experience the best part of its impressive lineup: the virtual reality selections.

Starting today, anyone with the Milk VR app for the Samsung Gear VR or a smartphone with the Sundance VR app and a Google Cardboard can watch more than a dozen of the festival’s virtual experiences for free. The VR experiences—ranging from Reggie Watts' Waves to Vrse's Waves of Grace (no relation)—will be available until Feb. 12. What's on offer is only a fraction of the lineup, but it's still a big move towards democratizing access to the kinds of VR works that often don’t get seen outside of conferences and film festivals.

"Sundance as a festival has been growing in different ways to make our program more accessible," says Shari Frilot, who heads up Sundance's New Frontier segment, adding that the festival also offers its short films online to reach a wider audience. "So this is a natural extension of what we’ve been doing all along to try to give access to people outside of Park City."

If last year was the start of the VR revolution in film, this year the movement is taking over.

The app was created in conjunction with IM360, and although the festival’s content will only be available on it for a couple weeks, the VR selections will be accessible again during several other events commemorating this year’s 10th anniversary of the New Frontier program, which offers not-quite-film forms of storytelling during the festival.

Sundance's move comes at a particularly hot moment for VR—both at the festival and globally. During last year's festival, New Frontier showed quite a few VR films, but Frilot notes, "it was what was [out] there, it was was what we found and what we scratched for." This year, programmers had hundreds of submissions to choose from and normal folks outside of tech and film/gaming communities have a lot more awareness of VR. If last year was the start of the VR revolution in film, this year the movement is taking over.

They also have a lot more access to virtual reality. The Samsung Gear VR is out in the wild. The Oculus Rift is coming. And, in a wake-up-and-smell-the-immersion moment last November, the New York Times mailed a million Google Cardboards to its subscribers. Those factors, in conjunction with the availability of the Sundance slate through its new app, says a lot about the growing access to, and embrace of, VR. If any of those Times subscribers still have their Cardboards laying around, they could spend this Sunday watching some of the same things that film geeks in Park City are seeing—and that's huge.

For the last couple of years, the biggest hurdle VR has faced has been getting itself in front of the people who might actually like it. Even Sundance’s director John Cooper, speaking to WIRED just last week, noted that he was surprised "how many people I talk to who have never tried it." If VR has any hope of becoming as commonplace as film, moves like this are essential, even if they only provide a glimpse of what’s possible.

Giving people that glimpse is exactly what Frilot hopes the new app will do. "This field is growing by leaps and bounds," she says, "and so is people’s desire to find points of access. There are a million people out there looking for content. This is what we’re trying to contribute to." And saving VR fans the cost of a plane ticket to Utah isn't so bad either.