With 4K TVs and 4DX theaters both making waves this year, it’s been a fabulous time for imbibers of entertainment, but this project doesn’t need a bazillion pixels or mile-high screens in order to be effective. This is virtual reality horror! The Oculus Rift, despite not being commercially available yet, is still continuing to broaden its own horizons, and now they’ve brought the 2013 indie horror film Banshee Chapter to the virtual reality headset for the most immersive scares that moviegoers have ever been a part of. At least, outside of a touchy-touchy haunted house.

Virtual reality experiences have always been a big part of sci-fi, though it’s almost always shown as an active tool rather than a casual one. And kicking back to get the shit scared out of you while watching a horror movie is about as passive as it gets. Director Blair Erickson made his feature debut with Banshee Chapter, but he’s well-known within the world of virtual reality and interactivity campaigns for different Hollywood studios. His company Jamwix worked with distribution company XLrator Media for Banshee Chapter: Oculus Rift Edition, which quite literally puts viewers right in the middle of the horror.

Interstellar is the kind of movie that I want to watch so badly that I’d even take a GameBoy version of it at this point. So it is with much jaw dropping and wolf whistling that I bring to you news of Christopher Nolan‘s universe-traversing film getting a virtual reality experience as part of the marketing campaign. This one is more legit than me promoting The Dark Knight by charging people to wear goggles and a pair of my Batman pajamas.

The brains behind the VR system Oculus Rift are working with Paramount Pictures and IMAX to make this extraordinary opportunity a reality in select cities. Using the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2, fans can strap on a headset and take a mindboggling three-minute ride through the cosmos on board the Endurance, the spaceship from Interstellar. You presumably don’t get to have conversations with Matthew McConnaughey’s Cooper or anything, but it still sounds like the most intriguing movie tie-in I can think of.

So, I don’t think we need to hype up the amazingness of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, do we? The company is constantly excelling at creating some truly unique experiences, and the Augmented Thrill Ride Project is no different. Here, the designers, engineers and computer whizzes (or whomever) have created an immersive experience that takes roller coaster riders to the next level. Take a look at the video below and get your mind blown and your stomach turned.

Thomas Wagner, who conceived this mind-boggling idea, is a professor of Virtual Design at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern in Germany. Back in February, he got in touch with German roller coaster manufacturer Mack Rides, who granted Wagner the use of two roller coasters for the purposes of research and development of the Oculus Rift version of a theme park ride. (The rides were Europa-Park’s Blue Fire and Pegasus.) Through well over a hundred test rides, Wagner and his team created some wild and crazy virtual travels, and now they’re able to publicly share them with the world.

Those of us who fall into a certain age bracket and who were young enough to see the Star Wars movies in the theaters have spent more of our lives wanting to/pretending to be Jedi Knights than we have on anything productive, like planning for the future or learning marketable skills. This may be an over generalization, but I don’t feel like it’s all that far off, or like this is a super outlandish statement. (I’ve definitely spent much more time wielding a pretend lightsaber than, say, learning to do my taxes, change the oil in a car, or finding out what an IRA is.) Leave it to technology to lend us a hand in this regard, as Oculus Rift may have just made it slightly easier for us to achieve our dreams of becoming Jedi Knights.

For those of you not in the know, Oculus Rift is a virtual reality system that uses a headset and earphones to immerse you in an artificial world, kind of like Lawnmower Man. Though it’s not currently commercially available, it’s been used in everything from gaming to architecture to education. And I’m thoroughly shocked that it took this long for someone to make Jedi training program, but that’s exactly what this video shows, and it looks totally rad.

Oculus Rift sounds just like something that comes straight out of science fiction. Head-mounted virtual reality devices have played huge roles in genre movies since the very concept of virtual reality became an idea the public was aware of. Now it’s looking more and more like this particular piece of high-tech wizardry could play a big part in the future of a sequel we’re looking forward to, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim 2.

There may not be another Pacific Rim movie coming out until 2017, but this property is tailor-made for the crowd and San Diego Comic-Con, so Legendary has gone ahead and booked some space on the crowded floor just for the hell of it. We’re not there, but our bigger, fancier sibling Cinema Blend is all over this epic gathering and has a report on these two things are coming together.

It was only a matter of time, especially once Facebook bought Oculus Rift. In an effort to compete with Sony’s Project Morpheus virtual reality system, Samsung has adopted an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach — namely, by teaming up with Oculus Rift to develop a platform that enables virtual reality experience and interaction for smartphones and media.

Samsung is working on the hardware end while Oculus works on the software, providing Samsung with assistance in developing its user interface and providing access to its mobile software development kit. In return, Samsung will provide Oculus access to its organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, the next wave of LED technology that replaces the bright LED dots with sheets of light that allow for glare-free and flexible lighting at resolutions higher than 1080p — in other words, a lighting system perfect for the gaming side of Oculus Rift’s business.