Oculus VR's Oculus Rift could be the device virtual reality needs to finally become adopted by the public and not just tech-frenzied neophiles (and mid-90s Hollywood, whose grasp on VR was breathtakingly stupid at best). It's a $300 virtual reality headset that can display stereoscopic 3D and offer head tracking to let users look around virtual worlds. In a few years, everyone might have their own Oculus Rift and use it to play video games and virtually tour other locations. Currently, the Oculus Rift is only available as a development kit, and is meant for software developers to use to create software for a future consumer version of the device.

Since it's a development kit, I can't fairly evaluate the Oculus Rift as a product or give it a score. I can, however, tentatively recommend it to gadget fanatics who want to try out virtual reality. It's $300, which is dirt cheap for a future-tech dev kit, and there are enough tech demos to offer you and your friends a fascinating, immersive experience.

For a dev kit, the Oculus Rift is surprisingly easy to get working with no programming knowledge whatsoever. It's nearly plug-and-play, and if you can follow simple instructions you can get it running with Team Fortress 2 and a few other games, as well as play with plenty of tech demos. I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn't have to tweak drivers or use an SDK and a programming environment to try out VR, and I wouldn't be surprised to finds the setup for any consumer Oculus Rift to be similar to this one's process.

Speaking of which, Oculus VR is staying quiet on the prospect of a consumer Oculus Rift for now. While dozens of developers are promising future native Oculus Rift support for previously released games, we've heard very little on the progress for that support on basically every game besides Team Fortress 2. More importantly, it's clear that even with native graphical and tracking support, games need redesigned user interfaces that better work with the Oculus Rift, based on the drastically different field of vision the Rift offers.

Oculus VR is trying to catch up to its slew of orders for the dev kit, and consumer adoption is a long way off, but if you're a tinkerer or extreme early adopter the Oculus Rift could be a great project for you. Besides ongoing testing with Oculus Rift-supported software, I plan to experiment with some lenses to see if I can open up our Rift to conventional side-by-side 3D, without the skewed (but more human eye-like) field of vision. For the price, it could be one of the most frustrating and rewarding tech toys you'll pick up this year.