With the launch of PlayStation's VR headset, we are clearly entering a brave new world of virtual reality – everything from the low-end Google Daydream to the far-too-expensive Oculus Rift.

But while interest has been focused on the gaming possibilities, an undercurrent of filmmakers has started exploring the storytelling possibilities that VR brings.

Most famous is Iron Man director Jon Favreau, who has created a "preview" story called Gnomes & Goblins. But at the Austin Film Festival this weekend, a number of other filmmakers took the stage to tell an excited crowd about their experiments with the form, and what they had learned so far.

First up: Deepak Chetty, a director, cinematographer and VR nerd who has won awards for his 3D short films and has been paid by the Washington Post, among others, to explore what VR can mean for real-world stories.

Chetty drew a distinction right away between virtual reality – through which games are experienced – and "immersive" content where your perspective is fixed but the content is "non-framed."

And that expression – "non-framed" – is perhaps the easiest way of understanding the distinction between the world of cinema as it is now and the world of VR storytelling that people like Chetty hope to create in future.

Cinema – the movies we watch today – are "framed." The director decides what fits within a given rectangular space in front of you. With VR, that space is all around you. And it requires a completely different approach.

"I like to call them 'flatties'," said Emily Best, the CEO of Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding site for independent filmmakers. "It also helps you think about VR as a completely different medium."

Pragmatic

Far from being pie-in-the-sky dreamers, the filmmakers are dead serious about learning the new language of VR filmmaking and, they point out, in this case the technology is far ahead of the techniques.

"The ability to do whatever you can imagine is coming real soon," says James Kaelan, who directed The Visitor, one of very few VR movies out there at the moment (you can buy it for 99 cents and watch it on the HTC Vive). With Google stepping up its Cardboard experience with its new Pixel phone and Daydream headset, with HTC's Vive, Playstation's VR, the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, as well as LG, SmartTheater, Inland VR, VR One and others, the technology is racing ahead.

Games manufacturers are pretty much in sync with the headsets and VR technology, largely because they have already created virtual electronic worlds and so moving into a broader spatial realm is a comparatively small step. But next down the list comes the camera technology to capture immersive worlds, and at the bottom, the storytelling of screenwriters.

"The first question you have to ask," says Best, addressing both screenwriters and directors, "is: 'why does this deserve to be in 360 degrees?' Because if you are just creating the same experience that we see now on a cinema screen, it makes no sense to do it this way."

Why bother at all? Because, done right, the immersive world is extremely powerful. Best tells a story about how she watched a VR film at a recent event. She put on the headset and headphones and saw a short film, Hard World for Small Things, in which she rode in the back of a car in South Central LA and then stopped outside a store. "You feel like a shy friend," she described the experience. The film moves inside the store, where, at its close, one of the main characters is shot dead by police.

"It was shocking, so shocking to me. And I pulled off the headset and I was in the middle of this party with people drinking beer and partying, and I've never felt so alone," she confessed. The intensity of the experience is such that the filmmakers considered whether there was an ethical consideration to ensure viewers didn't feel the disparity between the virtual world and the real world too strongly or too quickly.

Chetty describes a similar sense of awe when he saw the results of work with The Washington Post that captured what it was like to be underneath an airdrop in Africa. "It put me somewhere I could never be, and gave me an experience I could never have," he explained.

Where the cinematic experience has taken us in the realms of fantasy and science fiction with unnerving realism, one of the most powerful uses of VR may be to take us into the real-world experiences felt by others in other parts of the world.

But to get away from the possibilities and into the practicalities...