Almost 50,000 people already own Oculus’ first developer kit, which it released after raising $2.4m on Kickstarter in August 2012. But its latest prototype, dubbed “Crystal Cove”, sees a giant leap forward in capabilities. A demonstration of this, or something close to it, helped Oculus raise $75m in venture-capital funding last month, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

“VR is so new, it’s so challenging,” said Nate Mitchell, Oculus’ vice president of product. “The technology has quietly gotten better behind the scenes but bringing that all together into a cohesive package that’s simple and easy to use – that is challenging… We are doing a lot of cutting-edge technology development that it always helps to have money to go do.”

Talking Tech at CES 2014: Oculus Rift

Unfortunately, the Oculus Rift does have some drawbacks — mainly that you’re still stuck in a desk chair, shackled facing one direction because that’s where the keyboard and mouse is located. When paired with something like an omnidirectional treadmill, the Rift becomes much more immersive, albeit much more expensive. While the Rift team can’t quite tackle adding a treadmill into the mix just yet, it was able to tackle some smaller immersion issues with the release of a newer development kit, dubbed Crystal Cove.

The two 640×800 screens within the original Rift are essentially smartphone screens that together create a 1280×800 panel. In order to scale the image larger, magnifying lenses are placed over both eyes. On a non-Retina class display, if you stick your face right in front of the screen, you can see the individual pixels, and the overall image then looks much worse. Placing those magnifying lenses in front of the screens within the original Rift did the same, so even though the Rift worked — it didn’t look very good. Now, Crystal Cove has replaced those old screens with what equals a 1080p OLED.

Riffing on the Rift: Oculus Rift gets big Crystal Cove hardware upgrade at CES 2014

While a 1080p OLED display makes for much higher image quality, the original Rift’s biggest issue was that of motion blur. You may like the effect in your third-person shooter of choice, but it basically crippled the Rift. After all, the whole point of the device is to look around, but looking around isn’t very fun when you can’t see anything because it’s blurry and making you nauseous. The Crystal Cove upgrade has eliminated the motion blur, also eliminating the headache you receive after using the Rift for too long.

The Oculus Rift 'Crystal Cove' prototype is 2014's Best of CES winner