Does anyone have links to actual examples? The Rift dev kit has been available for a while now. Developers should have gotten past the 'VR makes too many people sick' phase and started looking at new ideas. What are these new ideas?
Personally I'm a little disappointed that most of the hype around VR has been explicitly focusing on the gaming aspect. The non-gaming applications of VR are much more exciting to me. I want a meditation room, where I can sit on a stormy mountain to think. I want to program in a virtual room with monitors on every surface, and pieces of code fixed in space, where I move to the code instead of the other way around. Maybe it'll work and maybe it won't - its impossible to know until the hardware gets good enough to try.
What are some really cool situations in which you can simply be present and be completely immersed? When I refocus my perspective this way, I think about being at a movie -- in a movie. Maybe I'm the gunner in the Millennium Falcon. Maybe I'm just a spectator on a nearby ship. Or maybe I'm sitting in a sports arena, as if really at the game, watching it and taking it in in a way I can't through my TV alone. Maybe I couldn't afford tickets to the Radiohead tour, but I can buy a virtual seat at any of the worldwide tour venues and see the concert with those crowds. That seems really fucking cool. I want to do that. I want to do that right now. And I don't need to run or jump around when I'm there. All I want to do is sit, and watch, and listen, and be present. And be immersed.
Whenever people think of VR, their thoughts immediately turn to gaming, and then they get disappointed when they realize that VR Skyrim or VR Grand Theft Auto (or what have you) isn't in the cards anytime soon. Instead of thinking about awesome scenarios where VR will fall short of the status quo, we should think of fun scenarios where VP will be a big step up from the status quo.