Virtual Reality (VR) is an amazing experience. However, it’s also a solo experience that can be hard to describe to anyone yet to don a headset and make the leap into that virtual world. As VR continues to expand its horizons in games, art, and a whole string of commercial applications from real estate to health, one of the enduring challenges for its cheerleaders is effectively showcasing the experience to those without access to VR hardware. Regular 2D videos shot from the first-person perspective of the user don’t do justice to the real experience; their limited field of view prevents them from truly giving a sense of the immersion into a 360-degree world.

To tackle this, VR hardware producers, application developers, and video makers have created a new VR video production paradigm, with green-screen, mixed-reality video. Shot from a third-person perspective, the technique allows the production of 2D videos that show the user in the heart of the experience—immersed in a virtual world, and interacting with the elements in it—in a way that first-person perspective videos simply can’t do. Until the day when every home has a VR headset, green-screen, mixed-reality video is likely to remain the best way to share the incredible VR experiences developers around the world are creating.