Skip to main content

Tour the White House in virtual reality with the Obamas as your guides

white house obama vr
Image used with permission by copyright holder
President-elect Donald Trump may be taking over the White House next week, but you can still get one last look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue while President Barack Obama resides there — and in virtual reality, no less.

Filmed by Felix & Paul, a VR film studio that has a number of 360-degree content under its belt, “The People’s House” is available to everyone as a 360-degree video, and thanks to a partnership with Oculus Studios, Gear VR and Oculus Rift owners can watch the tour with their headsets.

The video is a tour of the White House led by both Barack and Michelle Obama, who not only talk about the building’s history, but about their time spent in it for the past eight years. It’s not the first VR short film made by Paul & Felix to feature President Obama. “Through the Ages” takes the cake, and it showcases the president celebrating the National Parks Service Centennial at Yosemite.

The White House video, which was filmed in November and December, isn’t the final version — the full-length video will come later this year, but the production studio wanted to make sure a part of it is available before Obama leaves office. The current version on Facebook clocks in around eight minutes, and the full version is expected to be around 20 minutes long.

The full version will also feel more real, and have more depth, as it will be available in stereoscopic 3D. It’s unclear when it will be available, but for now, you can enjoy a personal tour of the White House led by the 44th President of the United States and the first lady here.

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
A dangerous new jailbreak for AI chatbots was just discovered
the side of a Microsoft building

Microsoft has released more details about a troubling new generative AI jailbreak technique it has discovered, called "Skeleton Key." Using this prompt injection method, malicious users can effectively bypass a chatbot's safety guardrails, the security features that keeps ChatGPT from going full Taye.

Skeleton Key is an example of a prompt injection or prompt engineering attack. It's a multi-turn strategy designed to essentially convince an AI model to ignore its ingrained safety guardrails, "[causing] the system to violate its operators’ policies, make decisions unduly influenced by a user, or execute malicious instructions," Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, wrote in the announcement.

Read more