Wow man you have some weird preconceived notions of what VR is. Have you actually used a VR headset because it sounds like you really have no experience with any of them if you think people are into it because of the "wow" factor. Yes that is the experience a lot of people have at first but the reason its not fading away is because it offers a truly new way to experience things. Hell even making people walk up to a "ledge" with a huge drop off in VR causes people to get nervous because their brain can't tell they aren't actually about to walk off a cliff. You don't get that from regular TV's.
That said you also don't seem to get what I mentioned when I said VR devices used by scientists and doctors. Your whole Minority Report example once again makes me wonder if you have ever used one of these devices because what you are talking about is more akin to Kinect, not VR.
When I said doctors were using VR to help with research, and I'm searching for the article, its because VR allowed them to get a much better spatial awareness of an organ they were going to be doing surgery on than just looking at pictures in their hands or scrolling through them with a mouse on a computer screen. Its something you can't really do with our tech as is and VR allows for some really interesting new applications and uses.
Other examples I've seen is architects talking about creating buildings in the virtual realm and using VR head sets to explore them and look for issues and to just get a better feeling for their work than they could just looking at CAD drawings or going over blue prints.
(FYI, replying in reverse)
Those sound like good applications of VR, to the degree that I could realistically see businesses/institutions purchasing and making use of the tech. However, I'd argue that these are very "business/educational oriented" markets, rather than a wider "consumer" market.
I feel that on a consumer level (i.e Games/Media), VR doesn't really offer enough for it to be viable. If we first look at the barrier to entry, there's not only a large cost involved (Which admittedly
could go down with time) but there's also technical and physical barriers to entry, not to mention the fact that we (as a society) are lazy.
When you look at statistics about things like mobile applications, there is a direct correlation between the amount of "clicks" it takes to get into an application, and the actual usage of said application (In other words, the more clicks to get to it, the fewer people using it). We're living in a time when people (Mass market) will actually not bother downloading/opening something if they can't get it immediately after clicking. I'll hold my hands up and admit to not playing a particular game because I couldn't be bothered waiting for the console to turn on, or because I couldn't be bothered inputting my password when I went to purchase it. We have become fickle.
With
those kinds of attitudes very prevalent in the wild, do you really expect people to be putting on headsets, adjusting focal lengths and clearing floor space years or maybe even months down the line, just to play a particular game? It boils down to it not being practical.
There was a very interesting design "ethos" at Nintendo when they were making the Wii. They said that Videogames were "useless". That meant that a consumer wouldn't bother spending time to learn something if they didn't actually
need it. They said that people don't care so much that their washing machines are complicated and confusing because they
need them, but with a game? Just return it or don't bother buying it in the first place. As much as they have made some pretty big mistakes over the past few years, I whole-heartedly agree with their sentiment in that regard, and I see it as a huge issue for VR to overcome if it is to appeal to the mass-market.
I'm kinda running out of time on my lunch-break here so I can't really talk about VR content to a great extent, but I'll try to summarise. I don't feel that the differences you get between a VR game and a not VR game are enough to justify the effort required to get VR "up and running", and I also feel VR will be much more limited in the types of entertainment it can provide that truly do provide a different experience. (e.g I don't see any real benefit to playing a 3rd person game in VR. The only appeal I can see is rooted firmly in 1st person experiences)
Like I said before, I don't
want VR to fail, because it's cool, but I don't think that it's current incarnation is going to be the "second coming of christ" that people seem to say it will be. It's Niche.
