For most of us, virtual reality remains a foggy notion. We know it’s out there and we’re excited about/intrigued by/terrified of it, but we have yet to really experience it at any significant level.

But make no mistake – VR and the immersive experiences it promises is coming, and it’s coming quickly. Once it’s fully arrived, the way we consume television content will be forever changed. Grab yourself a Google Cardboard or other VR viewer (hell even a pizza box and some spare parts’ll do) and get a glimpse of the future with these early adopters in television.

Discovery VR

Discovery is arguably leading the charge into the bold new realm of virtual reality. Available in both the App Store and Google Play, Discovery VR is a self-contained network of VR videos, with immersive original content and clips from shows such as Mythbusters, Gold Rush and Survivorman. Freely experimenting with the technology, the network has said it will release new VR videos every week on the app through at least next summer as part of a trial phase.

Investigation Discovery: A Crime to Remember

From a different corner of the Discovery universe, Investigation Discovery’s cinematic A Crime to Remember paired its November season 3 premiere with an interactive VR crime scene from the time period it covers – the 1950s and ‘60s. Visitors to ACrimeToRemember.com find themselves in the room where a murder has happened, a bloody corpse half-visible under the bed linens as two fedora-wearing detectives piece together clues. What the user can actually do during the two-minute scene is limited – mostly move around the room and read interesting factoids about the era – but the virtual environment evokes another time.

Syfy – The Expanse

The other company we would expect to blaze a trail into VR would be Syfy, and the network has happily obliged – with a VR app for its upcoming space drama The Expanse. More than 13,000 fans who encountered the offering when it debuted at Comic-Con got a firsthand look at the show’s world as the app deposited them directly into space, where they could float like a tiny moon around one of the show’s primary vessels, the Canterbury. Since then, Syfy has added more spaceships to the experience, such as the enormous Tycho Station and the Mormon missionary ship Nauvoo. The sky is truly the limit on this one.

Spike: Lip Sync Battle

One groundbreaker in VR television we would not have predicted is Spike’s popular show Lip Sync Battle, which launched a virtual version on the Milk VR app for Samsung’s Gear headset last spring. A show about celebrities mouthing the words to popular songs seems like an odd choice for a fully immersive, 360-degree experience, but the results make viewers feel like they are at the concert themselves, and hint at the incredible potential for pairing VR with live music. Indeed, some artists you might have heard of such as Sir Paul McCartney and Jack White are on board as well.

ABC News

One day, when we watch the news, we will be able to step into the field with reporters and accompany them wherever they go, whether that’s a war-torn landscape or a new restaurant downtown. In September, ABC launched a VR app offering a hint of what that might be like. ABC News VR gives users a 360-degree tour of Syria’s capital of Damascus, with host Alexander Marquardt supplying details about how the city is keeping its precious historical artifacts safe from the civil-war chaos. Footage for the experience was shot by stitching together images from 16 different cameras, all mounted on a single device.

ABC Family – Stitchers

On the flipside of the ABC technology canon, ABC Family promoted the June 2 launch of its sci-fi procedural Stitchers with a VR smartphone app called Hack the Case. The offering, like the premise of the show it’s based on, lets users solve a crime via access to memories of a murder victim, where clues unfold in a series of spheric video sequences. But perhaps the slickest part of the whole experience was ABC Family’s custom-branded Google Cardboard viewers.

Netflix

If your own living room just isn’t cutting it, you can now step into Netflix’s virtual living room on Samsung’s Gear and watch the streaming service’s entire catalogue in VR. There’s even a virtual couch and coffee table, though where that staircase goes is anyone’s guess. At first glance (at least to us), this offering seems a little redundant, but actually, it’s easily the most useful and brilliant app of this whole bunch. You can now watch Netflix… in a living room… whether you’re at the airport, on a plane, at a Starbucks, or anywhere else with an Internet connection… just by strapping on a headset. Next up in streaming VR: Hulu.

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