Virtual reality has been a long-desired dream of many a technophile, whether it was first glimpsed on the holodeck, in Back to the Future II or from the pages of a sci-fi novel. Until very recently the technology simply wasn’t up to what the creators of fictional virtual reality had promised us.

Technology has finally caught up. This year’s Cucalorus Film Festival Nov. 11-15 included a VR lounge upstairs at Ironclad Brewery.

Margee Herring, coordinator for the new Cucalorus Connect conference portion of the festival, said content producers who recognized how Cucalorus wanted to present virtual reality curated the Virtual Reality Lounge.

“It’s sort of an unparalleled presentation of the art form in its present state. So we have the best headsets that are out on the market right now,” she said during the festival. “And some of the content that’s been developed is really by some of the premiere virtual reality producers. Some of it is for entertainment. Some of it is for social justice.”

Local filmmaker Jessica Kantor’s The Archer was one of the entertainment pieces featured.

Other pieces were music videos, Sightline: The Chair (a 10-minute visual demo of VR capabilities), as well as activities such as rock climbing, swimming with dolphins and skateboarding. Horror short The Room kept people on their toes. Also included were Clouds Over Sidra, Waves of Grace and Catatonic, which are available through the Vrse app.

The VR lounge had two Oculus Rift DK2s attached to Mac minis and eight wireless Gear VRs. There were five stations with two headsets at each station. Each station had a person who’d explain what was on a particular headset.

Unofficial Cardboard, a cardboard VR viewer kit that works with smartphones, had its own table, as well, and gave out free viewers to Pegasorus pass holders.

Cucalorus executive director Dan Brawley’s first experience with VR was five years ago at the Sundance Film Festival.

“It was fascinating. ‘Whoa I’m in the room! I can look at the lights at a rock concert instead of a static shot of the stage,” he said. “And you can pop around. You can be right on stage and get the perspective of the performer.”

A problem was the size of equipment used to capture the footage, which was large enough it needed to be on a dolly.

Brawley said the technology is quickly improving on that front.

“There’s a guy maybe from New Zealand who’s developed a capture unit that is maybe the size of a grapefruit or a softball. It’s basically a bunch of GoPros duct-taped to a baseball,” Brawley said.

Virtual reality changes the way the viewer interacts with media, something Brawley finds interesting.

“To me it’s a pretty profound conceptual shift. In a lot of ways it mirrors what happened with maps when we all started using our phones,” he said. “It used to be you laid a map out on a flat surface, and you had to figure out where you were. Well, now you pick up your phone, and you’re always in the center of the map. So the same way, you used to sit back and look at a 2-D screen – a flat screen on the wall in a cinema. Now you actually put the cinema on your head, and you’re in it. You are the center of it.”

The weekend before Cucalorus, The New York Times gave out free Google Cardboard VR viewers to home delivery subscribers as there was a documentary being shown in virtual reality for the newspaper, The Displaced, a story about refugee children.

“This is hitting the streets as we speak, and a lot of people are getting ready to have their very first VR experience,” Brawley said. “The technology has come a long, long way in five years. As cameras have gotten smaller, the cameras can get closer together so stitching all the images together is a little less complicated. And also when you’re watching things, it’s a little more seamless.”

The Democratic presidential debate in October was the first news event live-streamed in VR. Brawley watched it on his Samsung GearVR headset.

“For days after the Democratic debate – without even thinking – I was telling people I went to the debate. Because I looked at the floor,” he said.

Brawley said he is excited about how VR technology could change the way stories are crafted.

“One of the curious challenges with all of this is there are no cameras to stand behind,” he said. “This format is going to drive a new way of telling stories and a new way of crafting narratives. The technology is going to push people to new places that we hadn’t even thought of.”