"Speaking as an avid desktop user, every smartphone looks like pure garbage next to my 3 GHz processor and 16 gigs of RAM and to add insult to injury you need to power it from a battery that can run out, for the privilege of a worse experience. They're expensive, you look incredibly stupid using one, you'll beat the crap out of the processor to make it work all for the joy of running the same programs you would've been running from a comfortable chair on a superior machine, on a screen less than a quarter the size."

VR headsets are fundamentally different from a screen strapped to your face, and provide a fundamentally different experience. Rotational and positional tracking with low latency mean that your view matches how you rotate your head, as if the entire environment around you is a screen. And tracked inputs give you ways of communicating 3D data that otherwise aren't really done on computers.

The Virtual Boy was a sad imitation, and while the Rift and Vive aren't legit holodecks, you're doing yourself a disservice by writing them off completely right now. I'd recommend trying a demo if you can find someone who has them!

> Speaking as an avid gamer, every VR headset looks like pure garbage

Have you tried any headsets? I got a free GearVR with my S7 and comparing the experience to a monitor just doesn't make any sense. With VR you get a sense of scale that a monitor just can't convey. In VR I feel that an object is right there in front of me. I can estimate its distance from me, as in 'that table is about 1 meter away'. It's a surreal feeling.

> you need to beef up your machine for the privilege of a worse experience.

Again. This doesn't make sense. The experience isn't worse. It's just different. It's so different that it's difficult to even compare monitor to HMD.

I gave my dad a demo and the sense of presence was so strong for him that he lost his balance just looking around in one of the lobbies. He's not a gamer and he had an ear to ear grin just looking around in the Oculus video lobby.

> They're expensive, you look incredibly stupid wearing one

That's true. I felt like an idiot wearing the headset.

As a gamer with a 4k monitor... no.

The closest to a feeling of presence you can try right now with little effort and at lost cost is to setup track-IR with a webcam and see what you are missing out on.

Ignoring whatever the hell Oculus is trying to do until their motion controllers come out, roomscale VR experiences are fundamentally different from anything that can be done on a 2D (or 3D) monitor. VR isn't at the stage where it can replace monitors for standard computer usage, but it isn't trying to do so.

I never said it was, it's routinely billed as the next generation of gaming (so much so that Steam won't shut up about it) and I think it's hooey. It's meh at it's best.

Well let's see how the Playstation VR goggles compare to Rift and Vive. I own a PS4 and preordered it, mostly because that's the setup that doesn't cost me anything extra in hardware.

Worst case it's going to be a strange looking extra monitor so the floor is pretty high imo. My network connection isn't good enough to stream 4k so for movies that's overkill and VR goggles basically give me an extra movie monitor.

> every VR headset looks like pure garbage next to my 4K monitor and to add insult to injury you need to beef up your machine for the privilege of a worse experience

if you have enough computer to drive even a relatively recent game at 4K you have plenty of machine to run VR.