French artist JR is no stranger to high praise that borders on incredulous.

His latest, "Walking New York", was commissioned by New York Times Magazine to both grace its Sunday cover and kick off a virtual reality-based media initiative which was announced just this morning.

It also spanned the entirety of Madison Square Park and was conceptualized to be guerrilla-style constructed in broad daylight, documentary-style recorded from a helicopter, and then destroyed within 24 hours of its completion.

It's got a lot of people talking, including tech-focused magazine and news outlet Wired.com, which just published a feature complete with quotes from Chris Milk (his company, VRSE, was behind the chopper camera), and Times editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein about VR's role in the emerging new media landscape.