Get ready to hang out with a dinosaur!
If you're a nature documentary fan, you're probably used to having David Attenborough narrate your journey through wondrous sights. But in the BBC video below, Attenborough shows us something we've never seen before: a walking, full-sized titanosaur, the largest dinosaur ever discovered.
But this is no ordinary video. It's a 360 degree immersive recording, meaning that you can "look" around yourself, as if the camera were attached to your eyes. The effect is pretty incredible.
If you watch it on a desktop or laptop, you can click and drag on the video to move the camera, but if you watch on mobile in the YouTube app, just moving your phone allows you to look around — which makes it seem like you are looking at an actual titanosaur through your phone's camera. Try to watch on WiFi so you can crank the quality settings up to at least 1080s60.
If you are an Android user in possession of a Google Cardboard kit, you can enable Cardboard viewing for an especially awesome immersive virtual reality-like experience (hey Google, can this feature come to iOS already?).
Here's the vid (the dino doesn't show up right away, and when it does it'll be behind Attenborough on your left):
But — amazingness of hanging out with the biggest dinosaur ever known aside — there's a lot more to take away from this video than, "hey, cool titanosaur."
First, let's admit: Immersive 360 degree video isn't perfect yet. The first time I tried to get someone else to watch this, there was some confusion about where to find the dinosaur — and the fact that you can look all over the place and not see it at first is a bit confusing.
This could have to do with understanding the grammar of 360 degree video. Up to this point, we just knew to look at a screen and see what it showed us. But with this new form of video, we can look anywhere, which is empowering and exciting, but also not something that viewers or filmmakers intuitively get — yet. I imagine we'll get better at giving and interpreting the visual cues for viewing this type of content over time, though more people will have to experiment with it first.
Now let's talk about why this is amazing.
It's immersive in ways that other videos are not. Watching this, it's fascinating to be able to look up and down the length of this massive creature as it walks past.
Why click away to another tab when you can glance around the screen? Check out the powerful legs on that creature, or take a glance at its massive heart as you contemplate how that organ powers a 122-foot-long body.
If you're viewing this on a Cardboard headset (or a Gear VR), you're getting a glimpse of the ways new technology is going to transform how we experience so much of the world — in ways that matter for understanding science, for entertainment, for travel, for education, and more.
It's important to note that, as a Wired story rightly points out, 360 degree videos seen with Google Cardboard devices aren't actually real VR. They're a taste of what real VR is like, but they don't communicate the same feeling of presence that an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive setup does, that full feeling of "I am actually here."
Still, videos like this are a new way that people will be able to experience parts of the world they can't get to. Students will be able to follow along in a biology class and look around to feel what it's like to be surrounded by an eroding coastline. People will be able to read about the Syrian refugee crisis and then actually see a refugee camp.
When people are doing this with actual, full-on VR headsets, these experiences will be even more powerful.
As Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo of the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (where Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey previously worked on VR) recently explained to Tech Insider, the potential here for educational content is incredible.
"You'll be able to visualize the structure of an atom as you fly around it," he says — something that sounds like a far more immersive experience than seeing an atom on a textbook page. "You can put kids in a human body and navigate to the heart," just a like a real-life Magic Schoolbus.
And for those of us who've always dreamed of it, we'll be able to walk along beside a dinosaur.
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered a terrifying new dinosaur from a mysterious period in history