“It’s not just a peripheral device for game developers,” said Danfung Dennis, a photojournalist who directed the Oscar-nominated feature “Hell and Back Again,” about the war in Afghanistan, and who was at the conference to show a new documentary made to be viewed with the Rift. “This is a new medium for storytelling.”

Image An attendee at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco trying the Morpheus Project system. Credit... Jason Henry for The New York Times

Yet figuring out the right visual language for games, movies and other fictional works in virtual reality is “probably going to be harder than the technology itself,” Mr. Dennis said. Cuts, for example, are extremely disorienting.

The Rift is basically a TV screen that sits in front of your eyes while you’re wearing a set of blacked-out ski goggles. Instead of manipulating the camera in the world with a hand-held controller, as you would with a normal video game, you perceive your “surroundings” by turning and craning your neck and head, just as you would in real life. Wearing a Rift makes you look ridiculous to others, but it also creates the sensation that you have teleported into an alternate universe.

Oculus VR sold 60,000 copies of its first development kit, which began shipping during last year’s Game Developers Conference, where people waited for hours in line to try it. This year, after introducing a vastly improved prototype, Oculus began facing public competition for the first time, most notably in the form of Sony’s Project Morpheus for the PlayStation 4.

Sony’s headset isn’t in stores, though the company is making it available to outside developers. At the conference, I used Morpheus to descend into the ocean in a shark cage; to participate in a spaceship dogfight; to battle a medieval dummy with swords; to explore a stone-cobbled courtyard; and to stand on the surface of Mars, as manifested by data from NASA’s Curiosity rover. When I leaned forward in the virtual shark cage to look into the ocean depths, I naturally and unconsciously reached out to grab the railing in front of me — and clawed at the air instead.