Like so many software demos running on the Oculus hardware, it was unnervingly effective. There's an inescapable urge to look everywhere but straight ahead while in Epic's Citadel world, even if the wood grain textures on the buildings were a bit more muddy than we'd like.

What the Rift lacks in resolution, though, it makes up for in incredibly smooth head tracking, an area that seems to have become an absolute obsession for the Oculus team.

The Rift is certainly one of the most amazing things I've seen at CES this year--hell, in any year. It's not really possible to describe what it's like to use it, but as soon as I put the goggles on and turned my head, I think my mouth dropped. It's flat-out awesome.

It’s still way too early to say whether the Rift will gather enough support to literally change the face of PC gaming (and eventually mobile gaming). But based on our experience–and the smile it instantly brought to our face–we’d say the Rift is 3D gaming done right.

There's a scene in "The Matrix," where Neo first jacks into Matrix after leaving it via the red pill. The screen gets all warpy, and zooooom abruptly he's standing somewhere else. It's not much of an exaggeration to say this is what it's like putting on the Oculus Rift.

Even shutters on a window popped out at my face and I walked around them to see tangible depth. When I got very close to objects, it felt like I was close, and that they were inches from my eyes.

The Oculus VR team brought a prototype version of the developer kit to CES, and as much as I want to dislike the notion of VR games (remember Virtual Boy?) this headset does an amazing job of making you feel immersed in a virtual world.

The experience is so immersive that it's actually a bit disorienting. Because the device currently has no headphones, the user is dropped into a 360-degree visual world that does not match the ambient sound in the room.

The bulky goggles felt light on my head, and the images covering my eyes immersed me inside a gaming world. When I moved my head, the images changed rapidly enough to match what I would see if I turned my head in normal life.

An exceptionally-promising piece of kit that heralds a new dawn for virtual and augmented reality, the Rift is still at an early stage.

When I put on the Rift I was amazed by how great everything felt when you moved your head. It’s an experience unlike anything else being made right now. When I took the headset off, however, reality set in.