"When VR started, everyone started these lists of things you can't do," Oculus creative producer Yelena Rachitsky told Engadget. "They always talked about explaining who you have to be as an audience. For example, you have to be a dead person, or someone who came out of a coma. The thing with all of these [new experiences] ... each one has you as a role of the audience all being completely different from each other, but they all work in their own way... I think creators are getting that much better at that blend of interactivity and storytelling."

Oculus shut down Story Studio, its internal VR production outfit, last year -- now it's bringing films from its partners to Sundance. Fable Studio, which is made up of former Story Studio employees, is debuting an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Wall. Additionally, there's Masters of the Sun, a virtual rendition of the Black Eyed Peas comic; Space Explorers: A New Dawn, an episodic series about the next generation of space travel; Spheres, a new experience from Fistful of Stars creator Eliza McNitt, which turns you into a black hole (literally); and Dispatch, which puts you in the shoes of a 9-1-1 dispatcher.

What's truly interesting about each of these experiences, based on my demos, is that they all bring something new to the world of virtual reality. In The Wolves in the Wall, you play as an imaginary friend to a young girl named Lucy. She's not your typical scripted character. Lucy can see where you're looking and cater her responses to that. She can hand you objects, and you can interrupt her during the story, based on what you're doing. Most intriguingly, she can remember what you've done in the past. She's the embodiment of what Fable Studio is aiming for: a truly interactive virtual character.

"[Wolves in the Wall] doesn't show interactivity in a blatant way," Rachitsky said. "Instead of picking up something or throwing something, it's much more subtle. There are a lot of things you might not notice... It doesn't change the course of the story, but it changes your experience."