Remote Cultural Experience

some thoughts:

The reasons for pursuing Remote Cultural Experience should be fairly straight-forward; however, I completely lack a concept or a means to achieve this solution

My initial thought was to incorporate some form of virtual reality.
The idea would be to
*dump some VR helmet on the user and barrage him or her with a POV video of Tokyo, complete with someone talking at you, people talking near you, Japanese writing everywhere.

*To bump up the level of interactivity and, therefore, enhance the level of immersion for the user, the video could be one
component to a VR game, in which the user could speak or carry out actions necessary to complete a level...

This all seems some what heavy handed, like cutting down a tree by driving a truck into it. Sure the tree will come down, but at what cost? The VR idea sounds costly, too literal, "un-clever", and at the end of the day, who wants to put that whole getup on?

Not to mention, would it even prove affective?