It's a rare sunny day in Seattle, Washington, and I'm standing in the grass outside a nondescript office building with engineers in hoodies strolling nearby. One of them, weirdly, is riding a unicycle. I look behind me; there's a canal, with water streaming by soothingly. I look down and notice a dark, narrow shadow in the grass. Maybe it's the shadow of a strangely shaped tree? I look up—yes, there are a few trees around, but none that would cast a shadow that looked that misshapen.

"There’s a weird shadow on the ground," I say out loud, knowing someone would be able to explain it to me.

"Oh—that must be the Jump camera rig." I hear the disembodied voice of Husain Bengali, a product manager at Jump, Google’s virtual reality platform.

Time to get back to reality. I lower Google's virtual reality set, Cardboard, that I've been holding up to my face, and instantly I'm back in a spartan room—which had been scrubbed clean of confidential blueprints before my arrival, I'm told—at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California. Bengali was showing me the first ever 360-degree virtual reality video made by his team, hastily filmed right outside the Jump offices by Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. "After we created that video and I watched it, that was the first moment I realized our team was on the right track," Bengali beams. He's part of the group leading the charge for innovative virtual reality video formats, and I'm getting a demo of the work they're releasing to the world today as part of YouTube's big, um, jump into VR.

I can see why Bengali is so proud. The video is impressive—most of all, because I could see how close and far the objects in the scene were to me. The illusion of depth is convincing. The guy on the unicycle (one of the Jump engineers, apparently) was several feet away. The other guys were walking closer to me. And the stream of water, right behind me, seemed near enough that I could jump in if I wanted to.

Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

Today, YouTube is unveiling 360-degree virtual reality videos and a virtual movie theater for all YouTube videos, available to anyone with a Google Cardboard headset. The features launch today for its Android app, and are coming "soon" for iOS. The goal is to “democratize virtual reality” and “bring VR to everybody, no matter who you are or what your favorite piece of content is,” YouTube says. “Virtual reality makes the experience of being there even more awesome and immersive.”

At launch, YouTube is featuring ten or so lifelike, 360-degree VR videos that the company shot itself. These include a tour of an Icelandic glacier, a performance by a violinist, and a computer-generated recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing. But Bengali says he expects that library of content to grow "very rapidly," especially as the company works with YouTube creators to get more VR content up on the platform. Any video, meanwhile, that had been filmed to showcase YouTube’s 360-degree video technology, which it unveiled in March, is viewable using a smartphone and Cardboard, too.

In an even more ambitious move, YouTube is also making every clip in its massive database viewable in a "virtual movie theater." Tap the Cardboard button that now appears within the YouTube app while watching video on your phone, and the video view changes. You can pop your phone into Cardboard and watch the clip in a kind of floating theater view. When you move your head, you’re prompted to "click to recenter" the clip, and view readjusts right with you. It would be great, one can imagine, for watching YouTube clips in bed with the VR headset balanced on your face.

"This is not just the first time that people can watch Jump virtual reality video, but any VR video," Bengali says.

VR for Creators and Advertisers

It's all part of YouTube's grand plan to stay way ahead of everyone else when it comes to being the most dynamic video platform on earth. Even as other tech behemoths seek to get in on online video, YouTube is still the clear leader, generating billions of views a day. But Facebook, its biggest competitor, is rapidly encroaching on YouTube's turf. During the company's earnings call with investors yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network is now seeing 8 billion daily video views. Facebook itself recently debuted 360 video. And the social networking giant owns Oculus, a company that makes a virtual reality headset.

YouTube is likely hoping that it can leverage its robust ecosystem of creators and advertisers to outmaneuver the competition. It’s already bet big on its stars, announcing partnerships with some of its biggest celebrities to make original shows and movies. According to Variety, these YouTube stars are even more influential among US teens than Hollywood celebrities. Now imagine if, say, one of PewDiePie’s exclusive videos was in virtual reality. YouTube says it is working with creators who are part of the Jump early access program free of charge for the time being.

Even creators who aren't directly working with YouTube can gain access to "Jump" technology that would let them create VR videos. YouTube says it is making the necessary equipment and software available in its YouTube Spaces—the studios the video company makes available to its creators. (The Jump platform consists of a 16-lens Go Pro camera that can record videos across 360 degrees; an "assembler," or cloud software that stitches the frames together; and the viewer, which is just YouTube on a smartphone slotted into a Cardboard VR headset.)

A Cardboard for Every Face

The one stumbling block is that not that many people have the equipment to experience VR. Google says some 1 million folks already own the Cardboard viewer, but that’s not nearly enough to satisfy the scope of YouTube’s enormous ambitions. So it's convenient that the company is launching these virtual reality features right before The New York Times ships 1.3 million Google Cardboard sets this weekend, as it debuts its new VR documentary, "The Displaced."

'Just like creators want to innovate with video, advertisers want to innovate with ads.' Kurt Wilms, YouTube product manager

All of which, of course, should be incredibly attractive to advertisers, who can also begin to consider marketing to audiences in VR. "The way I like to think about it is, just like creators want to innovate with video, advertisers want to innovate with ads," says Kurt Wilms, a product manager for YouTube. "This will enable them to do that."

Down the road, YouTube says it will introduce even more features, including 360-degree sound to cue VR audiences where, for example, to look so they don’t miss any of the action in the films. And there are a whole host of things creators have yet to fully explore, including educational applications or even applications that treat illnesses like PTSD. YouTube’s product managers themselves are quick to underscore the possibility for "empathic applications" with this technology, pointing specifically to its partnership with The Times, and, conceivably, other interested publishers, for reporting human interest stories in VR.

"We want every possible application to be explored," says Bengali. "We’d love for creators to figure out what else there is that we haven’t thought of."