Facebook's Oculus Quest is so engaging you might walk into a wall. But it's poised to become the first VR headset to offer a truly untethered VR experience.

The £300 Oculus Quest, launching in the spring with 50 titles, does away with cables, as well as the need for a gaming PC or external sensors. It's intended to provide a completely standalone virtual reality experience that lets you walk, jump, and duck inside virtual worlds without fear of tripping over a cord.

I tried the Quest at this week's Oculus Connect developer conference and came away thinking it might be what the industry needs to take VR mainstream.

The Oculus Quest isn't the first standalone VR headset. Earlier this year, Facebook launched the more affordable Oculus Go, but it's more of an introductory VR headset that does not track your physical position.

The Oculus Quest does what the Go does not; it's fitted with four wide-angle sensors on the headset's edges that'll scan your surroundings and your position relative to them. This means you can physically walk in the real world, and have your movement translated into VR.

Oculus demoed the Quest using several games in an area about the size of a typical living room. I slipped on the Oculus Quest headset and grabbed two touch controllers, one for each hand.

Once inside the headset, I found myself on a cartoon-like tennis court for a game of Project Tennis Scramble. Using a touch controller, I grabbed a racket and began hitting a tennis ball back and forth with another human player. The Oculus Quest detected all movement, from the swing of our hands to our bodies moving from one side of the court to the other.

In another demo, I played Superhot VR, where I dodged and ducked virtual bullets. The headset accurately registered most of my movements as I travelled from one stage to another, knocking down enemies by shooting them with a pistol or punching them.

The whole experience felt like I'd entered a larger world—a world so large that I was almost tempted to venture out and run as far as possible. To prevent crashes with real-world surroundings, the Oculus Quest will render neon-coloured boundary markers in the game. Cross a boundary and you'll end up hitting something real, like a piece of furniture or worse.

Despite these virtual guardrails, I did, at one point, almost run into a wall. Fortunately, Oculus VR staff were on hand to help prevent a collision. But one wonders what actual owners of this product will end up crashing into at home.

Nevertheless, the experience was fun and blood-pumping; it reminded me of 2006's Nintendo Wii, which also offered novel gameplay built around physical motion. The Oculus Quest may hold the same appeal by giving the public a truly unique gaming experience that can also help you burn some calories.

That said, the Quest may disappoint hardcore gamers looking for VR hardware with more computing power. The two games we played were rendered with relatively simple graphics; nothing looked too realistic.

Oculus VR has not yet released full specs for the Quest, but it's built with a smartphone chip, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, used in several flagship handsets last year. The Oculus Rift, in contrast, works by connecting to a PC that's running a dedicated Nvidia or AMD graphics card.

There's also no word on battery life, but don't expect a lot. The headset has a display resolution of 1,600 by 1,440 per eye, which will probably require a lot of juice to run.

Still, the Oculus Quest does bring us a step closer to a Ready Player One reality where everyone is running around wearing VR headsets. Sure, we may all look ridiculous, but at least it'll be fun.