The Airborne & Special Operations Museum Foundation (ASOMF) has built a permanent virtual reality attraction, the Airborne V/R Experience, inside the U.S. Army Airborne & Special Operations Museum in downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was developed with Mass Virtual, an Orlando-based VR developer whose usual work is military maintenance and sustainment training.
The experience puts visitors in a headset to see what it takes to prepare for a paratrooper's jump day, blending real-world footage with interactive storytelling. The Foundation describes it as family-friendly and aimed at visitors of all ages, and frames it as a way to carry the museum's Airborne and Special Operations history beyond the static galleries.
It occupies the space of the museum's motion simulator, which closed in 2023 as its technology aged. According to CityView, the Foundation used that closure to redesign the room, removing the simulator seating and pouring new concrete to make way for the VR installation.
The project was first shown publicly at the museum's National Airborne Day celebration on 16 August 2025, where visitors queued to try headsets for a short demonstration. Photographs of that demonstration show attendees using Meta Quest 3 headsets branded for Mass Virtual, with a bank of units charging on a table behind them. A full launch was originally announced for spring 2026; the Foundation subsequently set the public opening for Thursday 10 September 2026.
The Airborne V/R Experience costs $15 per person. Admission to the museum itself, which is part of the Army Museum Enterprise and managed by the U.S. Army Center of Military History, remains free.
The museum treats the VR installation as the opening move in a larger programme: the Center of Military History and the Foundation have embarked on a multiyear project to modernise exhibits that were twenty-five years old. Museum director Jim Bartlinski has called VR "the ASOM's first step toward a more immersive, 21st-century museum", and has been explicit that it is intended to deepen the stories the existing exhibits and artifacts tell rather than replace them.
