This, Mr. Kaiser said, is tantamount to faking a scene — and that’s not sound journalism.

Michael Oreskes, the news chief at N.P.R. and a former Times editor, wrote a cautionary note to his staff about the venture. I asked him to send me the memo, which includes praise for the experiment along with concern: “Our stories can’t be virtually true. They must be fully real.”

Well before The Times’s experiment, Tom Kent, the standards editor at The Associated Press, wrote on Medium that the nexus of journalism and V.R. technology means working through the challenges: “Common understandings of what techniques are ethically acceptable and what needs to be disclosed to viewers can go a long way toward guarding the future of V.R. as a legitimate journalistic tool.”

I talked to Mr. Silverstein, and others at The Times, about these concerns, which they made clear that they are taking seriously.

“There is a whole host of ethical considerations and standards issues that have to be grappled with,” Mr. Silverstein said, and The Times is doing just that. He and those involved with making the film met at length with the standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, among others, to go through the film piece by piece to make sure that it fairly represented reality. And his editor’s letter was meant to be as transparent as possible with readers about the process.

Ben C. Solomon, who shot the film, told me by email that the V.R. process brings special challenges.

“Since V.R. films a scene in 360 degrees, in every direction at the same time, there is no place for the photographer or filmmaker to stand unless they become a constant character in the scene. In traditional photo or video, they stand behind their camera and craft scenes so they do not appear to be present.” So, he said, “we had to hide.”

Mr. Corbett told me that “it would be crazy to think that all the implications, questions and issues have been settled and determined, or that we have a fully formed set of rules.” After all, he said, “It took decades to develop a body of best practices in news photography.”