I think we've been here before, and augmented reality will prove far more useful/practical.

How can this poll not have a joke about a Fleshlight interface?

Too obvious?

The last time I was in a VR rig was in the nineties. It was an arcade of sorts at Faneuil Hall and was meant IIRC to be a going concern, cashing in on the VR craze. At least the graphics will be a bit less chunky now.

Anybody else reminded of the Nintendo Power Glove?

A vomit-inducing accessory that will sell like hotcakes.

Has no one out here been following the oculus rift odyssey? This is the first bit of tech I've been excited about since the iPhone. And FYI, I'm not a gamer (I own a Wii that hasn't been played in about 5 years). The oculus guys seem to have the nausea problem beat, and all of the demo reports sound like this is the first vr that delivers on the vr promise of the 90s.

I do think it will primarily be games and entertainment, but who cares. If a non gamer like me is getting excited, I think they may be on to something. The report that has my nerd boner pulsing the strongest was the Aliens demo. It basically sounds like the scariest thing ever...like to the point that other jaded horror nerds were ripping the oculus off their heads because it was too fucking scary. and emersive.

And @2, yes I would like a fleshlight interface to go with it.

I can't wait seven years. I want to mock that baby right now.

All I want is a way to watch Netflix in bed, lying on my back, without having to hold a tablet, or to pay for some tripod contraption to hold it for me.

This would do it for me, and I like that it's also based on my phone (if that were my phone).

Here's some difficulties with the Oculus and Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). First of all, it can never count for a complete solution. If all you buy is an HMD the most you gain from it is the first person perspective view and, in the case of the Oculus, head swivel to look around. That's it really. As far as games are concerned, the only types that would really be applicable to are racing and flight simulators. This is because in those sorts of games your character is sitting in a cockpit with no natural ability other than looking around. There's still two other essential pieces to a complete VR experience: movement of your virtual self and manipulation of your environment. The idea currently is that you'd continue to use a gamepad along with the HMD so you still possess some capability. Consider the Xbox Kinect, its biggest problem was that if you moved outside the camera's view, it couldn't track you any more. So all Kinect games had to put your character on rails, thus making them less interesting than the usual gamepad games. HMDs won't enable you to swing a tennis racket, you need something to track your arms. HMDs won't let you turn your character and run for that tennis ball either. So $300 for an Oculus Rift is just the beginning. You'll then have to cobble together other products from other companies to provide the full experience. Then you need games that can actually use all those different devices in concert to control the game. Sixense is planning their STEM system to track your head position, arms, and legs, and all that will set you back $580. So you're looking at a $900 buy-in for what games? None so far. Perhaps some devs and publishers have signaled their intent, but it's the same quandary that expensive peripherals have always faced: people won't buy them unless there's content, and creators won't provide content unless people buy them. Will all of it work? Yes I'm pretty sure this time around VR will "work" in so far as that it'll probably be accurate enough to convince some people. Will it succeed? No, probably not.

I'll get interested in VR when there's brain link interfaces that can feed computer generated sensory data directly into our brains, bypassing the need for any physical movement in real space. Think the hookups in The Matrix. I'm pretty certain we'll have that before 2050, the question is whether or not there's any real money to be made in these stopgap VR solutions.

Star Fox