Are shared experiences the future of virtual reality?

VR is traditionally a lonely experience. After slipping on a headset, you're typically isolated (even if you're sitting in a group), and even multi-person experiences only let two or three people share the same world. But it doesn't have to be that way.From April 26 to May 4 at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, virtual reality company Parallux is premiering a new experience that 16 people can watch and enjoy together. The experience, Cave, is a tale set 12,000 years ago when stories were told around fires, harking back to the earliest days of shared storytelling. "When people will show up at Tribeca, they'll enter the VR arcade, and our experience cave will be in a separate room there," explains Sebastian Herscher, CEO of Parallux. "There are going to be 16 headsets on 16 seats, set up in two rows. They're going to walk in, be asked to sit down and relax, and be introduced to the equipment that we’re using, just as a little bit of onboarding.