The Stanford VR Tour, now known officially as Virtual Becomes Reality: A Stanford VR Experience, is now available for free on Steam for PC VR.
The tour is a series of different VR experiences design to act as a virtual, immersive tour of the different applications and impacts of virtual reality technology. It was previously only available to guests who visited the in person at the lab at the Stanford University. Check out the trailer below.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited the lab and experienced the Stanford Tour — along with other experiences like Valve’s VR room — before deciding to purchase Oculus in 2014, as detailed in Blake J Harris’ book The History of the Future. The tour is often cited as one of the experiences that helped Zuckerberg decide to purchase Oculus.
We confirmed with one of the tour’s developers, Jeremy Bailenson, that about half the experiences in the Steam version of the tour are the same as the ones that Zuckerberg and others experienced back in 2014, however they have since been ported over from Vizard into Unity and featured improved textures, lighting and models.
As mentioned in the Steam description, the tour used to run in-person for the first 24 people to show up at the lab at 4pm each Friday. Now, the tour is available for anyone as a free download on Steam for PC VR.
The experience is roomscale and best played with two hand controllers, however seated and one-handed play is supported for most of the scenes as well.
Virtual Becomes Reality: A Stanford VR Experience is available for free on Steam now, with support for Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
