The documentarist David Attenborough has ended up in a lot of singular situations over the years (like that time he oh-so-Britishly strolled toward a group of supposed cannibals running at him), but in his new program he may have topped them all. In Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur, he actually walks alongside a 120-foot-long titanosaur. The beast strolls lazily as Attenborough drops some knowledge next to it—the dino weighed 70 tons, for instance, equivalent to 15 African elephants. Then its skin fades. You see its skeleton and then its heart, which, Attenborough notes, would have alone outweighed him by a factor of three.

The clip is great, but in a way it's also jarring: This is an immersive 360-degree video, so you the viewer, by way of a VR headset or by clicking and dragging in your regular old browser, can crane your gaze around wherever you want, instead of staying fixed on Attenborough.

This is a literal and figurative new dimension for natural history. Where before you watched a host like Attenborough in 2-D, now you in essence direct the show, looking around like you’re operating the camera out there in the field. It presages a time when anyone can go on virtual expeditions. With 3-D printing, anyone with the right gear will be able to materialize a fish skeleton, or maybe even a piece of a titanosaur, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

Immersive 360-degree video (technically the dinosaur clip isn’t full-tilt VR) is still new and still a bit befuddling—not just for the viewer, but the producer. Traditional production won’t do here: Visualizing a story in an extra dimension requires a total reboot of the creative process. So the folks at the BBC had to improvise. “We ended up going back to basics and buying little plastic dinosaurs and just filming ourselves moving around a scene, and moving a little Lego man as David,” says producer Sam Hume.

The team treated it all more like theater than video. In a 360-degree space, you might have your back turned on the real action, so like a candle draws your attention in a stage production, so too can subtle cues work in an immersive environment—Attenborough turning away from you and looking at the dino, for instance.

If it's theater, it's going to be the best theater ever. Imagine, for instance, a VR film crew tagging along with a scientific expedition through the Amazon, or a threatened island off-limits to civilians. “We're looking at ways we can bring people virtually to places that are either too remote or too sensitive to be visited regularly, so it's almost like virtual ecotourism in a way,” says Ryan Wyatt, senior director of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, which is developing its own VR adventures.

VR will also take you to impossible places. You might manipulate a computer-generated cell, or take a trip through the human body, a la The Magic School Bus. And the prohibitively enormous, like a trip across the cosmos, will be a cinch.

When you can't go out in to the wider universe, the universe will be able to come to you. Biologist Adam Summers at the University of Washington can help you out. He’s building a massive database of CT-scanned fish bones, which anyone with a 3-D printer can materialize. “I really like the idea of viral science,” Summers says, “this viral crowdsourced science that can happen when you make the tools available and the raw data available.”

Think bigger: Anything scannable can be a file, from historical artifacts to fossils. So more and more, by way of VR and 3-D printing, science will leak out of museums and labs. “This is not a way to make the brick-and-mortar natural history museum obsolete,” Summers says. “It's a way to draw more people into the world of natural history.”

Next time it won't be Attenborough walking with a dinosaur—it'll be anyone with the right goggles.