PARK CITY, Utah – I never thought I'd ever say this, but I'm onstage with Beck. He's wearing his usual hat-and-blazer combo, and covering one of my favorite David Bowie songs. Out past the crowd is a full choir — a few faces I recognize because they played with Beck during last year's Station to Station rolling art extravaganza — and a massive musical ensemble. People are cheering and taking photos. It's incredible. Then I look down. Instead of seeing knees or feet, I see Beck's Chelsea boots.

That's when my brain reminds me I'm not actually on stage.

Instead, I'm sitting in a chair at the Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier installation, wearing an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. I'm watching a retooled version of the 360-degree interactive video of Beck's live performance of "Sound and Vision" that he and Chris Milk made for Lincoln last year. My I'm-a-rockstar dream is shattered, but it's possible that this might actually be cooler than performing with a folk hero – I get to have all the fun of performing without worrying about singing off-key or being incapacitated by stage fright.

"The first time I tried Chris Milk's Beck experience in VR, it fundamentally changed the way I thought about, frankly, audio in VR," says Nate Mitchell, Oculus' vice president of product, "and the impact a live concert could have on me in virtual reality."

It's not just concerts. All kinds of filmed entertainment, from documentary films to CGI masterpieces, are going to change. When the first Oculus prototype popped up in summer of 2012, everyone raved about how it would revolutionize the way we play videogames. But it's got all the components to change the way we watch films, or create an entirely new kind of visual experience. That's why Mitchell and the Oculus hit Sundance: They want to know what filmmakers can do with their system.

"Games are our passion," Mitchell says, "but when you take it and show it to people here, they're like, 'I have something. I have an idea and I want to take people someplace new.'"

Like where?

Space, for one. Mitchell and Oculus product lead Joe Chen, who brought Oculus to Sundance, said they've seen an uptick in the last six to eight months in the number of people in the film industry interested in how the VR headset could be used for movies. Among them was Alfonso Cuarón, who recently visited Oculus HQ to learn more. Mitchell notes, rightly, that the director's Gravity, with its POV shots framed by the astronauts' helmets and the vast scope of its scenes, would be perfect for VR. It's easy to see a movie like Pacific Rim working on the Rift too.

Those are obvious examples, though. There's potential for more. Much more. When Oculus raised $75 million in venture funding last month, investor Marc Andreessen noted that the Oculus VR system has the potential to not only change gaming, but "redefine fundamental human experiences in areas like film."

"Not only am I excited about the technology itself, but what it means for storytelling; that's why we curated the Rift for New Frontier," says Sundance senior programmer Shari Frilot. "This is a way technology can really change the way the story is told." And this is true whether the story is a big space epic or a documentary.

But in reality, no one — not even Oculus — knows what filmmakers will do with so powerful a tool. "Rule Number One: There are no rules yet," Chen says. What is known is that the ways that perspectives can change thanks to virtual reality are remarkable. Movies, as Roger Ebert said, are "like a machine that generates empathy." If a person in a VR headset can experience a protagonist's or antihero's life first-hand, then the Rift actually becomes that machine. (The possibilities for documentaries seems particularly appealing; Oculus Rift is already being used by artists to "gender swap.")

"Most of the material that's being developed for Oculus is gaming, which is very easy because it's obviously a gaming engine," says Milk, who worked on Arcade Fire's interactive video "The Wilderness Downtown." "A videogame system is set up to render any direction in realtime. In film, we are shooting one angle, one direction, and we're editing it with intent. What this gives you is a whole other dimension of emotional connection."

Of course, it'll be awhile until filmmakers will truly be able to create new experiences for the Rift. While Oculus showed a new, more powerful prototype at CES earlier this month, the company still hasn't announced a release date for the consumer unit, despite rumors of a launch this summer. Meanwhile, the tools necessary to actually create a film — or whatever an Oculus-based narrative feature would be called — are still being developed. Milk didn't make his "Sound and Vision" video expressly for VR purposes, but he had enough 360-degree footage and binaural sound to piece it together. However, he's doing what he can to make sure that won't always be a problem. While a company called Geonaute has a 360-degree camera that can port footage to Oculus, Milk wants to make a system that can pull off "full reality capture," and is currently plotting to launch a new company called Omnia that would develop and release filmmaking tools necessary to do just that.

"At the beginning of cinema," Milk says, "they were shooting trains coming at cameras and everyone was freaking out. This is a language that has been established over many, many years. I don't know what these new stories are going to look like ... but I'm creating the tools now to hopefully figure out what the language and narratives of this new evolving storytelling canvas eventually will be." We don't know what it'll look like either—but if it's anything like that Beck concert, there won't be much to complain about.