New York – Virtual reality may get most of its attention from gamers, but CNN vice president of premium content video Jason Farkas believes the technology is opening up a whole new aspect for television news, allowing networks and reporters to convey feelings as well as facts to their audiences.

At the Multichannel News/B&C VR 20/20 event here Monday, Farkas said VR allows viewers to more deeply identify with programs and news items by “giving witness” to them. And that can range from stories on climate change and war, to putting viewers behind the wheel of a Formula 1 race car, running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, or traveling back in time for an immersive look at historical events like the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

Read More: Complete Coverage of VR 20/20

Farkas said VR is a natural and logical extension for news organizations that for centuries through print, video and digital means strove to give their audience the experience of being there.

“With VR, we have that tool,” Farkas said.  

VR 20/20 kicked off NYC Television Week Monday (Oct. 16); read more #NYCTVWK stories here.

Lisa Martinez Gilpin, global head of news and publishing at Google Play, broke down the attributes of both virtual reality and augmented reality at the VR 20/20 opening session, and spelled out the roles both will play in the media going forward.

Augmented reality (AR) offers the user a “push and pull kind of dynamic,” she said, whereas virtual reality (VR) is more immersive.

Martinez Gilpin detailed Google’s history in VR, including 2014's Google Cardboard viewer, which she described as “simple with a lot of meaning.” She said a New York Times partnership a year later delivered more than 1 million Cardboard viewers to Times subscribers.

“Talk about coming into a really personal space,” she said. “We’re right there at your front door.”

Next was Daydream, offering a more breathable material than Cardboard. “There’s lots of great content to snack on,” said Martinez Gilpin, “as well as episodic content.”

VR 20/20 is happening Monday (Oct. 16) at the Stewart Hotel in Manhattan as the kick-off event of NYC Television Week.

Read More: Complete Coverage of VR 20/20

Martinez Gilpin said VR has a significant role in realms as varied as news and commerce. She spoke of “educating journalists to user VR cameras to tell their stories.”

Martinez Gilpin talked of ARCore, a platform for augmented reality apps. She described AR’s role in helping a consumer virtually try on clothing, or see how a coffee table fits in a family room, or check out a new car in different colors.

Read More: Complete Coverage of #NYCTVWK

Google’s Visual Positioning Service (VPS) can offer on-the-go consumers a look at a store’s layout before they visit. “It’s a great way to think about user flow,” she said, “and where products sit in store.”

VR, and AR, are part of the present, Martinez Gilpin suggested, not the future. “What used to take months now takes hours from a production standpoint,” she said. “It’s a lot more seamless and frictionless.”

Get complete coverage of NYC Television & Video Week.

New York – Predicting the future is a tricky thing, but it was a task taken on here Monday by Eric Romo, the co-founder and CEO of social virtual reality startup AltspaceVR.

Romo, the closing keynoter at VR 20/20, the first event for NewBay Media’s NYC Television & Video Week, offered his view on how key elements of the virtual reality (and augmented reality) market look today, and how they will evolve and change in the next three-plus years.

“The big challenge [for the industry] is too much looking forward,” Romo said, before reeling off this quote from Mark Twain: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

RELATED: NBC News, AltspaceVR Team on ‘Virtual Democracy Plaza’

Today, he noted, many investment firms have a "VR person,” the individual who understands what all this new stuff is about. He noted that this similarly played out during the early days of the Internet, “Web 2.0” and mobile, for example. Today, the notion that one person at any one company encapsulates any of those is “ridiculous,” he said, because they eventually became huge, enabling technologies. 

RELATED: VR 20/20: Unknowns Abound in Virtual and Augmented Reality Market

“And VR is the same,” Romo said, noting that companies will embrace and use VR as a foundational technology “or suffer.”  In 2020, there will no longer be “VR companies,” but companies that use VR to solve a problem, he said. 

Today, Romo said, 360-degree video is the dominant form of “passive” VR content that happens to work across all platforms. “People sort of know how to make it already,” he said of that category of content. In 2020, he predicted, new forms of “semi-passive” content will emerge and VR itself will become a new medium under which purpose-built content will flourish.

Today, everyone shows the “sunglasses slide,” representing the merging of VR and AR in a way that resembles a pair of Wayfarers. In 2020, he said, the sunglasses slide will be dropped as VR and AR “diverge” further and become more useful and support more markets and specific applications.

Today, Romo pointed out, consumers receive VR content by pairing viewers with mobile phones, gaming consoles or high-powered  PCs. If the industry is being honest with itself, it will admit that this is a “broken” model for most. Romo predicted that in 2020 stand-alone platforms “optimized for VR” will become dominant and outsell today’s approaches, offering up Oculus’s Santa Cruz project and the Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820 and Intel’s “Alloy” reference platforms among examples of standalone-facing projects that are already well underway.

Today, Romo noted, the “Metaverse” – generally defined as a collective, virtual shared space --  is viewed as a place someone will build, based on what’s been proposed in books such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.  The Metaverse that will emerge in 2020, Romo said, will embody “the evolution of the Internet” and will become something different than anything being imagined today.  It will not be purposefully built, he said, but will instead materialize from the hard work of disparate groups, all trying to deliver great experiences.

 “It’s organic…it’s an evolution,” Romo said.