You are definitely not alone. This comes up whenever someone demos an immersive 360 video player. But, you are being picky. Arguing for hard-edged semantic barriers is possibly the greatest time waster on the internet. It would be more productive to say that immersive, 3-DOF display of mono, 360 video is really crappy VR. Similarly, a good Google Cardboard experience can at least be stereo, but the 3-DOF tracking is probably terrible, so it is also really crappy VR.

Unfortunately, the infancy of consumer VR will not mature instantly into excellent hardware and software production value for all users on day one. Instead, it will follow a power law curve like everything else does. In the mean time, the best we can do is try to remind the millions of people watching mono 360 videos on their terrible-tracking Cardboards that what they are seeing is really, really crappy VR.

I liken it to watching a cellphone video of a live concert on a cellphone. You are just barely watching a concert... And, if you've never been to one, you shouldn't assume you now know what going to an excellent concert is like.

It is possible to do stereo display of 360 video in the browser - you just need Google Cardboard or similar to allow users to view it.

How? I've never seen a stereo 360 video before. How do you avoid the camera recording itself?

You use a bunch of cameras, calculate a depthmap, and use the spherical video and the depthmap to apply parallax, like this [0, 1] but spherical. It's a kind of faked stereo video.

Google Jump is one such camera jig that use 16 cameras [2].

[0] http://depthy.me/ [1] http://www.scalari.net/2008/04/22/generating-stereoscopic-im... [2] https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/

You record from two sets of cameras positioned an average eye distance apart, then project one set of cameras to the inside of a sphere shown to one eye, and the other set to the other eye.

The limitation is that the cameras are arranged horizontally (current gen), so the stereo effect is lost if you tilt your head, as well as at the north/south poles of the spheres.

And it really needs some degree of positional tracking as well for it to be true VR. Simple stereoscopic 360 video is far more immersive when your view responds realistically to small head movements.

We're back to stereo and mono....just like the good old days.

Agree, there is definitely a long way down the road to get to more realistic VR experience for video, especially for streaming. That's currently a starting point.

Have you seen that you can change the rendering modes of the player to also use it on Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard?

I completely agree, but there is some historic precedence for this with QuickTime VR.

Yes. I'm also getting sick of the phrase "poisoning the well".