The New Revolution VR-coaster is basically an on-rails first-person shooter like House Of The Dead or Time Crisis. Riders dive and careen through a city being invaded by aliens. By tapping on the side of their VR goggles they can shoot the aliens out of the sky, or, more likely, punch themselves in the head with the force of a roller coaster as they try. And while you no longer have to worry about communal plastic gun handles giving you chlamydia, be prepared for what we can only assume will be a huge pink-eye outbreak.

Meanwhile, Acer is working on a VR helmet specifically for theme parks and arcades, and there's a company based in Utah that runs a VR laser-tag park called "The Void" that's going to have an outpost in Times Square by this summer. And that's just the beginning. Since by all accounts this new generation of VR is legit, the tech is probably destined to quickly become a staple of overpriced roadside tourist traps run by sketchy guys with NASCAR-branded sunglasses.

Even if you regularly make an effort read and watch the news, it can still be difficult to fully empathize with the people featured in it. Without firsthand experience all you can do is use the information to paint as vivid a mental image as you can as you imagine their struggles. Virtual reality is already changing that by making the news more impactful and more emotionally resonant. If VR can convince people they're falling off a building when they absolutely know they're walking on solid ground, just think of how tangible and, frankly, painful it would be to experience the struggle of someone thousands of miles away.

The New York Times is experimenting with that kind of storytelling right now. Anyone with a VR headset, even the simple ones that are just a smartphone in a cardboard box, can experience the unsettling sense of physical presence within the stories they report in virtual reality. The sight of people praying and crying at a vigil honoring the lives lost in the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris is made so much more powerful in VR than as a picture on the front page of a newspaper or a 2D video on a website.

Same goes for this VR report titled "The Displaced," about three refugee children who fled their homelands to escape war and certain death.

Now, the question is, would this make people more empathetic to the struggles of strangers, or would it go the other way and harden the resolve of people who couldn't give a shit about other people's problems? I assume it'd be a mix of the two, with one set becoming hyper-empathetic and another growing ever more callous. And it would have to be an almost super-villainous level of callousness, since they'd be looking the plight and pain in the eyes, to the point where even the Grinch's heart would grow three sizes and still wouldn't be satisfied with the degree of closeness because the goggles don't allow them to tell those people to stop being little bitches and that a little genocide never hurt anyone.

My brain got its ass kicked the first time I saw an online ticket vendor offer a computer-generated approximation of the view from the seat I'd selected. I guess I'll be soaring to the basketball game in my flying car and eating my $14 hot dog in pill form, because the future is now, I thought. Little did I know that only a few years later virtual reality would render that convenience as obsolete as a Polaroid dick pic.

StubHub
This irrelevant garbage might as well be an oil painting.

StubHub is developing a virtual reality version of seat previews. Meaning, you won't just get the painfully antiquated picture preview you used to get back in the ancient times (last week). You'll get a fully immersive, cutting-edge, almost-real sense of what it would be like to actually sit in the specific seat you've chosen. It'll be like you're there, in the arena, rubbing your butt on every empty seat. You'll be able to perceive the tangible differences between a $90 seat and the $80 seat a few rows behind it. Now all it needs to do is sit you behind a 6-foot-11 behemoth of a man who has a head the width of an IMAX screen.

Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images
"If I wanted to see this I would have stayed home and stared at my dick."

Even more exciting is the obvious next step for this idea. Imagine a seat in a stadium or arena specifically for people at home who want to watch a live event through their VR rig. The NBA has already experimented with that idea, and there's a company out there trying to do something similar with live concerts. Who knows? Fifteen years from now we might all be virtually sitting on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, while in reality we're eating nachos naked on a toilet.

Even the data gathered from the best documented crime scene can be diluted when all the information gets flattened out onto sheets of paper presented to a jury that needs this information to render a fair verdict. Things like bullet trajectories and blood spatters are all vital to understanding a crime, and they can be accidentally misinterpreted simply because the medium used to present them has inherent drawbacks that prevent the whole story from being told. This is one of the areas where virtual reality excels. Every detail of a crime scene can be re-created exactly in a virtual space that a jury can explore.

whatwolf/iStock/Getty Images
"Goddammit, Juror Number 6! For the last time: There are
no hadoukens in crime scene re-creations!"

And it works. The people behind the technology gathered data from an actual shooting wherein police officers were fired upon and re-created every detail in virtual reality. When they presented their re-creation to the police officers who were involved in the shooting, they couldn't believe how accurate it was.

Since the crime scene re-creation tech is basically the same as the software used to make video games, crime scene re-creators can accurately replicate tiny details like height, distance, and the physical relation between objects and people -- all things needed to obtain a more complete understanding of events. If you've played Batman: Arkham Knight, you've already experienced something like this every time Batman analyzes a crime scene; now you can be happy our real-world justice system has finally caught up to a fictional vigilante.

Rocksteady Studios
*Batman enters women's dressing room and virtually re-creates them undressing*

The tech is still young and isn't yet considered admissible evidence. It's got a lot to prove before it can be used to decide innocence or guilt. I say, why the wait? I mean, truth, justice, and accuracy are important and all, but there's no selling point better than, "This shit makes you Batman."