In a break from tradition, this year’s opening night event of the Adelaide film festival featured not a feature film screening but an unprecedented party described as a “digital carnival” and a “degustation of screen delights”.

When I first read that, I thought: sounds dangerous. Dangerous because the centrepiece of the evening would be a production in virtual reality: a medium that, since its inception, has been associated with nauseated viewers and upset tummies.

Various manifestos have proposed how VR film-makers can avoid summoning the return of their audience’s most recent meals, including keeping the camera still and using dissolve transitions for scene changes.

What effect would a biblical flood of alcohol and canapés – necessary for any special event worth its imported salt in the Australian arts scene – have on the VR experience?

Adelaide’s Tonsley Innovation Centre is a huge, warehouse-like, unfriendly looking space – perfect for a Secret Cinema screening of Children of Men. Cardboard VR headsets, similar to the kind produced by Google, lie on every table, in front of every chair, inches away from buckets of champagne and bottles of wine.

But the really dangerous part of the party turned out to be the technology itself.

The VR app we experience before the event officially begins is impressive: a virtual rendering of the same space we are in, with the outline of red, pixelated people at various virtual spots in the room.

If you linger your sight line on a particular figure, a text box appears with a description, and photo, of an artist whose work is showcased at the festival – such as South Korean film-maker Gina Kim and American animator Tyler Hurd.

But after excitable speeches and a countdown – huge descending numbers displayed on a cinema-sized screen behind the stage – the VR film we’re there to watch doesn’t actually work. My screen says “video loading”; on every table, confused guests lift their headsets off their faces and ask each other what is going on.

“Let’s raise a glass to risk-taking,” says festival director Amanda Duthie, addressing the glitchy elephant in the room. And indeed, in the context of film festival programming, that is not a bad thing to drink to: perhaps glitches are the price you pay for bold and interesting programming, of the technology-reliant kind.

Forty-odd minutes later, after several speeches, the technology is working and we watch an extended scene from the evening’s pièce de résistance: The Summation of Force VR. This visually striking, cricket-themed, smokey black and white experience is an adaptation of an eight channel moving image museum piece, created by husband and wife team Trent Parke and Narelle Autio.

It was brought to VR with collaboration from Matthew Bate, who recently directed the documentary Sam Klemke’s Time Machine, and it plays with perspective and framing in interesting ways. A different set of images appear depending on which direction you turn your head; the experience feels both voyeuristic and highly stylised.

So will virtual reality film premieres become regular events in the future? Will they change the nature of film festivals, or even the nature of film itself? At the very least, the medium heralds a new era for documentaries, celebrated for its ability to solicit empathy from viewers.

In these infancy years of VR, Australians already have some notable runs on the board. None more so than Lynette Wallworth’s Emmy-nominated VR doco Collisions, which – partly funded by the Adelaide Film Festival (and also part of last night’s program) – is one of the finest virtual reality documentaries to date.

Australian virtual reality film-makers are still finding their feet, as they are across the world. Some have suggested music-video director Chris Milk may be closest equivalent virtual reality films have to an auteur, though his style – evidenced in work such as the critically acclaimed Clouds Over Sidra – lacks a distinctive edge. The medium’s true auteurs are yet to emerge.

The Australian narrative VR film Remember, directed by George Kacevski, is a highly ambitious – albeit flawed – rumination on artificial intelligence attempting to construct memories, with a Shyamalan-esque last minute twist.

Via Alice by Daniel Stricker and John Kirby, which recently played at Carriageworks in Sydney, is an impressive Indigenous performance piece with beautiful dancing and choreography.

If, or when, virtual reality takes off in a big way, what will that mean for the future of film-making? Will we even call these productions “films”, or will another term be coined to describe them? There aren’t many events on the cultural calendar that cause one to ponder such things.

And thankfully, to the best of my knowledge, and despite the technical glitches, Adelaide’s Film Festival’s VR experience did not summon the return of anybody’s meal.

• Adelaide film festival continues until 15 October. Guardian Australia visited Adelaide as a guest of the festival