There are loads of uses for high-quality VR platforms. Even if first person gaming (or gaming at all) is the primary focus of early development due to easier i

There are loads of uses for high-quality VR platforms. Even if first person gaming (or gaming at all) is the primary focus of early development due to easier integration with existing game engines, I imagine that in the long run, it will offer something more akin to the development of high-end mobile devices. Sure, those allowed for some unique gaming applications but there are also things that weren't necessarily the initial focus but are now common uses of those platforms. I'm thinking of things like immersive 3d "movies" that put you right in the action as an observer while actually seated in your chair. The other massive application that is seeing a lot of promise is 3d telepresence. Instead of doing a video Hangout or a Skype call on a flat screen, you could use depth cameras to record 3d video maps of each endpoint and stream that info to the other participants. You won't just be looking through a little (or big) window into another location, you'll see things as if you were actually sitting there. I still think the whole idea of treadmills or even Valve's thing to be a sort of attempt to shoehorn the conventions that were successful on 2D screens into VR. I'm glad to see any development and experimentation but I don't personally think the platform will ultimately evolve toward a more immersive extension of the current first person gaming paradigm. Just from my ~8 months of working with a Rift dev unit I've found first person, non-seated experiences to be some of the more limiting or difficult things to pull off well or for extended periods. I'm sure being able to walk around and get 1:1 representation will go a long way but you're still limited unless you focus on more of an AR solution. Still, it reminds me of a brainstorm/daydream I had a decade or two ago when first reading about modern attemts at virtual and augmented reality. I thought the simplest implementation of a FPS would be along the lines of laser tag. Since laser tag puts you in a predefined environment, you could set something up where the computing was either done on a backpack/wearable platform (or now, I guess on servers that communicate with headsets) and overlay everything on the actual pre-built structure around you. That way you'd get the tactile response of whatever walls and floors and obstacles are around you but the AR/VR stuff would texture things to look like a space station or catacombs or whatever you want. The Valve device seems like an early version of this and I'm interested in how Microsoft's HoloLens will compare in real world usage.