Pinc: Oculus Rift for the iPhone (opens in new tab)

Imagine visiting your friends or parents or relatives in another continent, without having to move from your chair. No, not like Skype or whatnot, actually BEING there with them. VR can give you that (and in the future, it can give you force feedback and tactile feedback too!). You will be able to visit the Coliseum in Rome without moving from your NYC apartment. You will be able to commute to work in milliseconds without having to get up from your bed. People with moving disabilities (like a wheelchair or whatnot) will be able to walk again and interact with people as they never have done before.

Furthermore, VR can be used to train people in several jobs, like being a pilot, a surgeon, a firefighter or whatnot. Even put people in situations they have never been before. It can be used by psychologists and doctors to treat patients, diagnose mental problems, study and research some conditions of the mind, etc etc.

Last, but not least, AR can provide an additional layer of information on top of our everyday life. Yes, VR gets you stuck in a chair at home and you will never go outside, but when/if you do, there is AR to assist you. You will be able to interact with every terminal around you while walking down the city (or at a park, or whatnot). You will have an overlay of information and knowledge on top of reality that will not only make your life easier, it will AUGMENT it. Nevermind hiring a guide when you want to actually visit a museum, you can just pop on your AR kit and tap into the knowledgebase of every person in the world. Just there, at the tip of your fingers.

Anyhow, let's be real, AR and VR are damn cool anyway.

Fuck reality, we're going Virtual

This doesn't seem to have any external sensors, no low level / latency access to display driver, and with an iPhone6 720p-ish display, I can't see how there will be enough resolution - the GearVR with its 2560x1440 display appears low res enough - if this worked, and I highly doubt it, we would be regressing to DK1 levels of quality at best. You wouldn't be able to read key labels on a virtual keyboard at that resolution.

The 60Hz refresh is fine. Latency >>> refresh. Even 30hz gfx update with 60hz timewarp actually feels "fairly" comfortable with gearvr if you can put up wth the slightly swimmy image - as long as you dont drop frames. 60hz with dropped frames is a far worse experience.

This is google cardboard in a pretty skin.

There are already a few teams working on prototypes that make use of one or more Kinect depth cameras to "record" a room in 3D so you can put yourself back in these recorded 3d scenes later on. Others have been experimenting with encoding and compressing this data for transmission over networks and decoding at the other end to provide a sort of real-time 3d telepresence.

Obviously it's limited by using Kinect depth cameras, current consumer computers, and standard broadband networks but the way I see it, my first Treo smartphone was limited by the SoC and touchscreen tech of the time as well as the wireless data networks of the time. Still, it eventually evolved into the iPhones and Nexuses of today.

I think that at some point, the head-mounted hardware will become more ergonomic and more functional at costs that allow them to be sold to average users. Likewise, the hardware and software to capture and encode 3d video models of a room or "scene" will become more commonplace. Right now it's games and demos...parlor tricks like the first motion picture reels that eventually led to IMAX movies.