Virtual reality (VR) allows aspiring urban farmers to experience rural life.

Brooklyn, New York City, is a long way from the cornfields, but it may be a little closer thanks to the efforts of researchers at Cornell University. The scientists claim to have created the most advanced VR urban farm tour ever. The new software is part of an effort to use VR to broaden the appeal of agriculture.

“It offers a middle ground between an in-person experience and a virtual meeting that allows for distance learning, but with context and detail that is typically missing from online engagement,” Tapan Parikh, an associate professor of computer and information science at Cornell, told Lifewire in an email interview. Parikh is a co-author of the paper, “Greening the Virtual City: Accelerating Peer-to-Peer Learning in Urban Agriculture with Virtual Reality Environments,” which was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities.

Cornell researchers used drones to create a virtual model of Red Hook Farms, an urban agriculture and food justice program in Brooklyn.