Through his latest role (and with the use of a virtual reality headset) you can see Union City resident and veteran actor Jim Thalman portray a character practically in the room with you.

In the short film “Vera,” Thalman plays Robert – one of two former lovers who meet up in a New York City restaurant during WW1. Actress Caroline Duncan, like Thalman a veteran of stage and screen, plays the eponymous Vera.

Thalman describes the period, costume drama as a “dialogue-intensive, emotionally-heavy, raw, visceral love story,” and what distinguishes and maybe enhances it as an experience is that director Krzysztof Pietroszek and his team shot it all with multiple 8K cameras, making for what they’re billing the first 5D film in the world.

8K is presently the highest video quality available, and like 4K, the present most widely-used (and not particularly so) form of high definition, the K stands for processing roughly a thousand pixels. Broadcast television is presented at about 1,000 pixels. Being able to process eight times that requires a lot of processing power, and while a few Hollywood films like “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2” and “Mortal Engines” have been shot in 8K, they’ve mostly used the format to capture the best 4K-level footage they can – including for use in 3D presentations.

While what was often billed as “4D” used to be an enhanced 3D presentation (in venues that provided scents and water spraying on your face to mimic what characters were experiencing in a film, “4D is what we’re now deeming virtual reality,” Thalman said in an interview with The Jersey Journal.

“We’re the first 5D film in the world, which means you can actually come in and sit and be inside the movie with us, the principal actors,” Thalman said. “You can actually put on the Oculus glasses (a brand of virtual reality headset) and be surrounded by us. Although your level of participation is minimized, nonetheless you can be in the world.”

Thalman is excited by the possibilities that this new medium offers, specifically if one university experiment pans out. “We’re talking about this in a manner of where interactive gaming meets the filmmaking,” he said. “Now, I do know for a fact that there’s an experiment going on right now at UCLA that they’re looking at ways to block the synaptic receptors in the brain that let you know that this is not reality … Once they block the receptor, that in in my eyes create a whole new generation of horror and sci-fi film that can be really terrifying and a whole lot of fun in a lot of different ways.”

Thalman, who built his career on period films and costume dramas, has become increasing enamored with genre fare. “I hope ... that horror and science fiction storytellers will gravitate toward this kind of storytelling, because all of a sudden it becomes a multibillion dollar marketplace,” Thalman said. “You just have to have those first few films that are, for lack of a better term, the guinea pigs – the people that really take the big risks, which is in this case our director and our producer Emma Mankey Hidem.

“But we’re the first into the foray and hopefully we become one of the teams that adds bigger companies … that say, ‘OK these guys and gals know what they’re doing. They understand the technology, the obligation to filmmaking, they just need more money to do it with. Let’s fund these guys and allow them to build a library for us.’”

Thalman, who co-founded Union City-based multimedia production group the Hudson Exploited Theater Company (HexTC), got involved with this film because director Pietroszek knew of his work. “I’m a little more famous in Europe,” Thalman said, “and the director had to have seen some of my movies.”

According to Thalman, “Vera,” which is distinctly not a horror or sci-fi film, goes through huge strides to make great use of the other unique strengths of the volumetric medium. “I say it brings me back to my theater roots because the trick with shooting in 5D is you can’t cut. We had to do the whole film in one take (the director wanted actors who straddle the film and theatrical worlds for this reason, said Thalman) … We shot three films simultaneously and we’ll allow the filmmakers to screen this film in different venues in different mediums all over the globe.”

What makes one version of “Vera” particularly new is that “they want to do these installations around the world where they actually bind the pixelation of the world to rooted and grounded objects, so (...) you as the viewer with the Oculus goggles on, you’ll sit down on a chair that’s been created by the FX department but in the installation there’ll be a seat there waiting for you," Thalman said. "They’re creating a world in a computer for you as a human being to experience in the world.” Once, during rehearsals, Thalman said having to stop so a technical glitch could be worked out made him look at the robot he was working with, think, then go “holy s--t.”

“This robot was capturing everything I’m doing (and) the person on the other end gets to be my leading lady – male or female doesn’t matter. That person on the other on the end could be a widow, 73 years old ... They get to say, ‘Oh, let me step out of this and immerse myself in something else.’’

When Thalman told Pietroszek that, he said the director laughed hysterically and told him, ‘That’s what I’m talking about. We’re in a world where the sky is the limit.’"

To follow news on “Vera,” including on a podcast discussion on making the film Thursday, Feb. 7, follow Jim Thalman at instagram.com/jim.thalman and visit Sunnyside V.R. at https://m.facebook.com/sunnysidevr/.