Reality is no longer set in stone. Wiith Oculus and Morpheus both offering the means to escape into new worlds, virtual reality is a tangible future. Alongside them is Microsoft’s HoloLens . While it might look similar in so much it involves a headset, in truth it offers a very different but no less enticing fantasy. Importantly, the world isn't shut out by HoloLens, it becomes a digital playground and integral to experience.

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If you missed it, above is the full HoloLens Minecraft demo from E3.

“ the world isn't shut out by HoloLens, it becomes a digital playground."

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Although officially announced earlier in the year, it was the Minecraft demo at Microsoft’s E3 press conference this summer which brought HoloLens to life. We saw a Minecraft world emerge from a regular table. We saw it exist and be manipulated in three-dimensional space right before our eyes (you know what I mean). And it looked like the future.At Minecon in London earlier today, I got to experience the same demo for myself, and while the presentation at E3 was slightly misleading – HoloLens has a more limited field of view than that footage implies (much more detail on this below) – it's not significant enough to undermine the underlying technology or obscure what it could bring to video games in general.Putting it on is easy, with an inner band securing the device to your head with just a couple of quick adjustments. The unit has weight to it, yet it didn't feel cumbersome (though I used it for no more than 10 minutes). It's also worth noting – especially as I don't think this has been communicated enough – HoloLens isn't a peripheral; it has its own CPU and GPU, and was fully hosting the holographic version of Minecraft I played.

HoloLens has also been used with Halo. Listen to our impressions from E3 above.

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“ It's like a magic trick, and even though you know how it's being done, it's no less fascinating."

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The demo begins like a typical game of Minecraft: I have a 360 controller in my hands, I see the Minecraft logo before me, but as the game boots up blocks tumble from the sky around me. I look to my left, and they’re spilling over the sofa (they’re also burying the man from Microsoft who’s doing his best to explain what's going on, even though he can’t see any of it). HoloLens is silently mapping the room around me, working out the curvature of objects and they’re relative position to one another, and with that data it can create the terrain onto which these blocks are falling. Reality is absorbed into the virtual world and the effect is fantastic.I load up a saved world and start exploring it on a huge TV on the wall right in front of me. The screen in question isn’t actually there, but HoloLens makes it appear so. Using voice gestures, I can make the screen bigger or smaller or even switch it into stereoscopic 3D. There’s an additional mode beyond regular 3D – holographic 3D – and this is where the demo really showcases what’s unique about this hardware. At this point, I’m encouraged to stand up and walk towards the screen, and it obvious this is no longer just a screen and a flat representation of this virtual world – it’s like a great big hole has been punched through the demo room wall and on the other side is my game of Minecraft, waiting for me. I can peer through this hole and gaze up at the sky or down at the floor. It's like a magic trick, and even though you know how it's being done, it's no less fascinating.At this point, I’m told to look at the table that’s positioned in the middle of the room. Another voice gesture transplants the game from the screen to the table in front of me – the wooden surface turns into blocks which fall away and slowly the world I’ve been exploring emerges in front of me. It's like I'm looking down on a highly-detailed scale model. The zoomed-out perspective emphasises just how high-resolution the holographic images are – I’m still able to discern individual blocks at a distance – and the colours are vibrant. Occasionally I experienced a small amount of chromatic aberration (ghosting of blue, red, or green), but it was never that bad and might be due to the hasty fitting of the device.

Watch the new teaser trailer for Minecraft: Story Mode shown at Minecon 2015.

“ I was impressed by the technology, the core idea, and its potential for video games."

While the field of view might expand with future iterations, it sounds like it won’t change much before release. Adjustments are being made to the hardware, but they sound minor and the unit I tried out was close to being final. That said, as I walked around the table surveying this 3D Minecraft world, I was impressed by the technology, the core idea, and its potential for video games. I pinched my forefinger and thumb together and dragged the world up out of the table, exposing its subterranean domains. I bent my knees and peered through cracks in the earth. I was able to look at specific points in the map, issue a voice command to put down a marker, hop back into the game and play it on a virtual TV back on the comfy sofa. Hololens isn’t being used to create a VR version of Minecraft; it’s doing something much more interesting and exciting. Players are encouraged to move back-and-forth between a traditional, sofa-bound experience and this entirely new mode where the game spills out into the living room and can be interacted with in entirely new ways.The restricted field of vision is a significant drawback – in placing a border around the illusion it succeeds in breaking it – but the potential and quality of underlying technology can’t be denied. I was most impressed by how it adapted Minecraft to suit its unique hardware. This wasn’t just Minecraft played through the visor, but a new version that could only exist on HoloLens. In more than one sense, it changed how I look at Minecraft.

Daniel is IGN's Games Editor over in London. He writes about movies, too. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter