As expected, virtual reality pioneers Oculus VR are showing off a newer prototype version of their head-mounted display at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, and reports are describing it as another huge improvement on previous iterations.

Oculus are referring to this latest prototype as Crystal Cove and according to Wired, latency is down to around 30ms, largely thanks to an OLED panel "faster than any LCD monitor on the market", and it also packs completely 3D positional motion tracking with an infrared camera that tracks white dots on the device alongside the other inbuilt positional sensors.

Two new demos are being shown to attendees of CES 2014, with Wired describing a new Unreal Engine 4 Elemental demo from Epic Games, and EVE: Valkyrie, the space combat game being developed by Eve Online creators CCP:

The demo also highlights the display’s low persistence. In previous prototypes, turning your head quickly caused your surroundings to blur, an effect caused by the device registering new movement before the frame had a chance to update. Iribe describes it as “the wrong image being stuck to your face.” That’s effectively gone now.

“In the past,” Iribe says, “people would have to stop moving to stare at something. With low persistence, you can continue to stare at an object or read text while you’re moving your head.”

A second demo allows users to play EVE: Valkyrie, a space dogfighting game that’s part of the EVE: Online universe. Oculus brought the demo to E3 last year on its non-HD prototypes, but the company has updated it with the new feature set and the 1080p screen.

Of course, Oculus being Oculus, how the Crystal Cove prototype accomplishes low persistence and 6-DOF tracking are subject to change.

“This is just a feature prototype,” Iribe says. “It’s not at all representative of the final consumer look and feel. Once we feel like something is good enough and we’re confident we’ll be able to ship it with the consumer product, we feel good about announcing it. We still may change how it’s done, but we feel great about the positional tracking system. It’s been a year in the works, we’ve tried multiple different approaches, and this delivered the experience we were looking for.”

We can't wait to try it for ourselves.