Everyone said HoloLens was legit when it was first announced back in January. Including us . Needless to say, I was eagerly anticipating getting to try it for myself, and Microsoft's "Halo Experience" at E3 2015 gave me the opportunity to do just that. To be clear up front, this was a tech demo. It will not be a part of Halo 5 now or anytime soon. It was merely meant to show off the capabilities of HoloLens in a gaming environment.

This is an image captured from my HoloLens experience, which was a training pre-brief for Halo 5's Warzone mode.

“ It literally looked like a Halo action figure had come to life and was talking to me, in real 3D space.

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“ HoloLens may prove to be the literal game-changing complement to the Xbox console that Kinect always wanted to be but never could.

Once it was calibrated, I was told to stand up, look down a hallway (the entire "experience" took place inside a room meant to resemble a UNSC ship), and wait for further instructions. Those instructions popped up in the form of a waypoint marker that was down the hallway, exactly as it appears on Master Chief's MJOLNIR visor in the game. I walked toward it, and I couldn't help but smile. Even if just for a small moment, Halo had become real.Once inside the briefing room, six of us assembled around a table, again modeled after what you'd see on a UNSC ship. In the center, a holographic 3D model of the UNSC Infinity spun around, and you could interact with it using a virtual pointer. And here's where the technology is still very limited right now: the field of view is very small. It's not quite as bad as looking through a mail slot, but the top and bottom of my viewing area kept getting cut off.As she went on, her avatar was replaced by a holographic 3D overview of the Warzone map we'd be playing on (seen in the videos above and below), and she pointed out key areas of interest. When she got to the bit about how Warzone introduces the occasional AI "boss," a giant Hunter Elder appeared in front of me, again making me feel like a f***ing Halo toy had sprung to life on the table. The HoloLens hype had been real, it turned out. And if the final, consumer version of HoloLens can deliver content experiences like this -- and hopefully increase the field of view -- than this augmented-reality device may prove to be the literal game-changing complement to the Xbox console that Kinect always wanted to be but never could.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.