LAS VEGAS — It’s no Oculus Rift, and it costs about 40 times less – but Google’s cardboard virtual reality headset has given The New York Times a runway to a\u00a0VR future.\u00a0Now the publisher plans to put branded content, as well as high-impact editorial, inside this new world.<\/p>\n
For its new NYT VR app<\/a>, the Gray Lady last year began commissioning virtual reality video reportage like The Displaced<\/a>, taking viewers inside the lives of three children displaced by the global refugee crisis, and Take Flight<\/a>, a celebration of air travel.<\/p>\n But the scheme’s real genius was in putting cheap, introductory VR viewers in to the hands of a million of its newspaper home delivery subscribers,\u00a0via Google’s self-assembly Cardboard headset.<\/p>\n “Although Google Cardboard is an intermediary technology \u2026 the evidence is\u00a0that the entire thing worked,” NYT CEO Mark Thompson tells Beet.TV in this video interview at the Consumer Electronics Show. “People understood the concept, were intrigued and excited by it, tried it out and enjoyed it enough that they kept it in their homes.<\/p>\n “VR is already margin-positive for us. We\u2019re making money out of VR. We expect to make money from VR again in 2016.”<\/p>\n