So, I ran out to Walmart last night and bought one.
Ouch...
It's neat, but this tech should not be sold yet, IMO. It's still in the early stages, fit for "proof of concept" but not for mass market appeal, and not to fulfill its potential of supplanting the TV screen.
For it to actually be "the future" it still has far too many shortcomings.
For instance, resolution. It looks as if I'm playing on very small screen and I'm getting as close as I can to it. There's a lot of detail loss and blurriness, especially when looking beyond the foreground; that right there kills it for traditional games, even for appreciating a landscape in an open world game.
It's not the complexity of the graphics on display (I'm OK with less polygons and less realistic textures, etc), but when I look at the same image on the big TV I appreciate the size : pixel density (it's not crammed into a tiny screen with the same ppi), even if I'm no longer "in" the world.
Then, there is the problem of the "diving bell" effect. I can see the black edges of the headset everywhere, so I feel like my "presence" is through a "VR diving suit" in every game. It works for the underwater game, but not so much for the rest.
Bottom line, everyone at home is having fun with it, but too much of that which I'm used to and enjoy in modern games has been turned back in time in order to demonstrate the concept of presence.
I would have been OK with demo stations here and there until the tech matures and costs go down.
For example, higher pixel density per eye, and flexible displays that can dome around your peripherals and FULLY block out the real world and replace it with the virtual one. Reduce the bulk of the headset. It's already light, slim it down, lose some cables (something my family raised their eyebrows at), make it less awkward to have a "VR session". Then sell it.
I'm not one for halfway steps, especially when I'm paying out the ass for it.
But it's neat.
My plan worked!