But after spending weeks with the black, fabric-covered Rift headset, I can see there’s a lot more to it—and to virtual reality in general—than just playing games. These headsets make it easier to feel totally transported (even for just a short time) while learning about new worlds and watching films whose scenes change depending on where you’re looking. Today the number of impressive experiences is limited to a handful of games, films, and other apps that let you explore VR. But the good ones are so entrancing that the technology is sure to inspire a boom in content creation and experimentation.

Virtual field trips

In addition to traveling to the moon, you can use Rift to kayak down the Colorado River while checking out the Grand Canyon, tossing tiny pellets to lure passing fish. You can dive with sharks, sea turtles, and other creatures, watching exhalation bubbles seep from the spot where your face mask should be and feeling that prickly sense you get when you’re actually underwater, wondering if something is creeping up behind you.

Over the next three years, such virtual field trips will become a lot more common, says Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. His lab built one such experience, called The Crystal Reef, which lets you swim through areas of varying acidity in the ocean to explore the effects of carbon dioxide on underwater habitats. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, and Bailenson expects it to be available for Rift and HTC’s Vive headset in a few months.

One big question, though, is whether people will go on such excursions together—interacting with one another in the virtual world—or disappear from each other inside their own headsets. The idea that virtual reality could be a social rather than a solo experience is perhaps the biggest reason Facebook CEO Mark ­Zuckerberg spent $2 billion for Oculus back in 2014. At the time, Zuckerberg predicted that VR’s ability to make you feel “truly present” will let you “share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life.”

The existing social interactions within virtual reality are not really fun yet. You can, for instance, use a blocky avatar to talk with other people in VR on the social platform AltspaceVR, as long as those people happen to have a Vive, a Rift, or a Gear VR, which is made by Samsung and works with a smartphone. Mostly what I’ve done in AltspaceVR is approach other people’s avatars and comment on how weird it all felt.