It’s hard to remember, but the same skepticism once dogged the two devices that now define the sea change known as “mobile”: the smartphone and the tablet. In the 1990s, the Apple Newton, a tablet and a “personal digital assistant,” was considered a marvel by the specs. A single-surface networked personal computer, it came with an impressive screen and plenty of memory. But consumers rejected it. A hand-held device that didn’t fit in pockets, play music, display photos or even make phone calls? The somber Newton didn’t thrill anyone, so users didn’t bother to make room for it in their everyday lives. Instead, they roundly mocked it for its price and its many bugs. Merely debugging it seemed out of the question, though; its failure was taken as proof that nobody wanted a tablet computer. After the Newton’s disgrace, Steve Jobs declared the tablet categorically discredited. “It turns out people want keyboards,” he said in 2003.

And he seemed to be right — that is, until people couldn’t care less about keyboards. Starting in 2007, when Jobs himself unveiled the iPhone, people spontaneously seemed to switch desires: Now what they craved for their texting, emailing, social networking and web surfing were touchscreens. The iPhone was defiantly keyboard-free; its primary competitor at the time of its release, the BlackBerry, hung onto its physical keyboard all the way to oblivion. And by 2010, the keyboardless tablet — the iPad — made its reappearance. At its release event, Jobs approvingly quoted The Wall Street Journal, which said, “Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”

Similar reversals happened in the mid-2000s with e-books and video calling, two long-dreamed-of technologies that appeared perennially hopeless until Skype and Amazon made them suddenly ubiquitous. And it seems to be happening with virtual reality today. Indeed, fans of the Oculus Rift discover a pleasure so deep that John Carmack, Oculus’s chief technology officer, invokes it with a particular solemnity. It’s called “presence.” To achieve presence with an Oculus headset means to be suffused with the conviction — a cellular conviction, both unimpeachable and too deep for words — that you are in another world.

Presence is still coming into a definition, but we know two things about it: It feels good, and it’s different from verisimilitude. As Norman Chan explained on Tested.com, a virtual world decidedly does not feel like reality. For one, it still entails game graphics, rendered in a special way that schematically simulates depth. And even less true to life is the effect of personal disembodiment, as the user’s own body is left largely unrepresented in the virtual world. But with presence, as Chan explains, you do get a profound sensation of space, causing you to forget you’re staring at a screen. Presence is fragile, but when achieved, it’s so joyful and sustaining that those who touch it tend to fall silent.

I’ve found presence twice in Oculus experiences: HBO’s “Ascend the Wall” and a live-action airborne tour of a Dubai skyscraper. Each time it was glorious. The skyscraper tour came as part of a reel by Total Cinema 360, a production company in New York founded by two former N.Y.U. film-school students that creates virtual-reality programming, as well as interactive, immersive omnidirectional video. To see the reel, the filmmakers seated me with the Oculus headset, on which I witnessed, taking place all around me, various cinematic vignettes: two lovers sharing pillow talk, a rock concert from the stage and then — suddenly — the Dubai flight, which the company made as part of a recruitment package for a firm in the city.

In that flight I lost myself. I can’t tell you how I was airborne, exactly; maybe I was in a harness, in a parachute mysteriously ascending. I sailed close to the sky-high architecture, somehow alongside it, where I could examine it, as if I were Philippe Petit on a high wire. But also entirely safe. I could look up at the sky and down — way down — without fear, as my wordless physiology signaled to me that I was rising and in zero danger of falling. This was flight, and not the nightmare kind with crashes; flight as in the best dreams of being winged and soaring, as happy as you’ve ever been.