He's not quite so proud of the new 7-inch screen. Originally, the Rift was scheduled to ship to Kickstarter backers by the holidays, but the original 5.6-inch screen proved impossible to buy in bulk. "No, no, you don't understand, we don't have that many panels and they don't exist," Luckey's supplier told him. So Oculus went with a larger 7-inch panel. "It impacted everything," says Luckey. The company had to completely redesign the casing, the lenses, even the control board, using 3D printers to speed the work.

Still, bigger is better, right? Not really. The new 7-inch screen improves in some ways, with less motion blur and a higher contrast ratio that makes it appear less washed out, but it also has lower pixel density and weighs 90 grams more than its counterpart. The weight in the front of the headset necessitated an extra headstrap — "With the additional weight, it's almost a requirement," says Mitchell — which in turn added more bulk. The whole unit weighs about 379g, or about eight-tenths of a pound, and while it's quite bearable compared to some of the headsets in Palmer Luckey's personal collection, it's definitely far more noticeable than the featherweight prototype we tried at CES. Oculus is quite upfront about the issue, and says the consumer version will almost certainly have a smaller screen, hinting at the recent crop of 5-inch, 1080p cell phones on the market. When I ask if the team literally pulls apart each and every new high-end smartphone to take a look at its screen, I'm greeted by knowing laughter. Later, I find just such a phone on Luckey's desk.