If the price of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift put you off virtual reality, what if all it cost you was the price of a 12 pack of Coke? That's something that Coca Cola has been experimenting with with a new type of packaging that lets you turn a 12 pack into a Google Cardboard-like VR headset.

You need to be quite handy with a bit of folding, though you needn't be a cardboard origami master to make it work. The lenses are still missing, but perhaps that's something that Coca Cola could include on the packaging as a little promotional bonus – it wouldn't cost too much if they were ground out of plastic rather than glass.

From there all users would have to do is pop their phone in and boot up some form of VR application, and they have a simple VR headset to play around with. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eamKy74n-vM']

Although far less feature-filled than the likes of the aforementioned HMDs from HTC and Oculus, Google Cardboard is the most widely available VR headset in the world and with smartphones not requiring any additional processing power to display VR content, they represent the way most people will step into virtual reality for the first time.

Expanding that availability through Coca Cola packaging would be a very simple way to reach a lot more people.

KitGuru Says: In the age old war between bottlers of fizzy, black sugar-water, would a free, basic VR HMD convince you to go Coke over Pepsi? 

Become a Patron!