Ars Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland was the first member of the Ars staff to try out Oculus’ updated Crescent Bay head-mounted display back in September, and since then the Facebook-owned VR company’s technology demonstrator has learned a new trick: its integrated headphones can output highly accurate positional audio.

This might not seem hugely significant at first, but Oculus wants its Rift headsets to provide a sense of total immersion, and audio sources that sound like they actually come from a consistent location even while the wearer twists their head around are crucial to that immersion. Oculus ran us through a neat updated demo loop that had us standing on the edge of a skyscraper like Batman, running from giant T-rexes, and watching two big robotic arms zip around and fight a magic wand duel, and as near as we could tell, the sound remained solidly anchored to where it should be, even as we wandered around and moved our head in and out of the scene.

In fact, the audio’s positioning and tracking was good enough that I didn’t really notice it until it was pointed out to me by the Oculus folks. That’s some of the highest praise it’s possible to give to immersive technology like this: when it works right, you don’t notice that there’s a whiz-bang new bit of magic happening. It just happens and you accept it as part of the environment. Developers wanting to take advantage of this capability will be able to do so with a new audio SDK, which is not yet available.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

As noted by Kyle when he wore the device back in September, visually Crescent Bay looks miles ahead of the Development Kit 2 on our desk at home. The “screen door effect”—the visible grid pattern of pixels that show up in front of the wearer’s eyes—is drastically reduced (though it’s not altogether absent). Oculus hasn’t announced the resolution or refresh rate of Crescent Bay, but by our estimation the display is at least 1440p (likely a 2650x1440 pixel panel, providing 1280x1440 pixels per eye). As someone who uses a Rift Development Kit 2 for several hours a week , the extra resolution was hugely noticeable—as was the vastly decreased weight of the Crescent Bay headset versus the draggy, heavy DK2.

We also got a chance to spend about 15 minutes with the Oculus Gear VR, and I came away agreeing with Kyle’s take: I was a lot more impressed than I thought I would be. Though it’s tempting to pooh-pooh the Samsung-driven Gear VR as gimmicky, it actually was quite neat to sit down and play the part-tech-demo, part-game Hero Bound for a few minutes, watching my avatar bash away at skeletons and zombies in 3D from an elevated perspective. Though the Gear VR necessarily lacks the Rift’s positional tracking, it uses both the connected Samsung Galaxy Note 4’s sensors and some additional sensors in the device’s body to provide what felt like a lag-free head tracking experience.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I begged and threatened, none of the Oculus folks had any info to announce about the release version of the Rift, other than to say that it would still probably be out in 2015—at least, that’s the plan for now. Even though the Crescent Bay devices are vastly better than the DK2s in the hands of developers, Oculus has no plans to release them—we’ll just have to wait for the much-anticipated consumer version.