> Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year

Not good ones though. Any VR headset without positional tracking is essentially a google cardboard.

Sure, but when the iPhone came out I'd already been using Palm and PocketPC smartphones for a few years. At the time I thought "any smartphone without the ability to install third party software, send MMS messages, use a GPS radio to locate me accurately, copy and paste, or even change the ringtone is essentially just a feature phone".

Things start out simple, limited, clunky, and expensive. Occasionally they become capable, svelte, commonplace, and affordable after 5 or 10 years of development and refinement.

Yeah, I think it's pretty safe bet that it will get there, I just haven't seen any announcements regarding an upcoming standalone tetherless headset with positional tracking.

I don't agree with this sentiment. VR enthusiasts tend to cite 3dof tracking as a non-starter but I have seen enough evidence to suggest that 3dof head tracking is sufficient to deliver comfortable, long sessions for social VR applications. The reason 3dof is not a non-starter is because you can still interact with people in a very natural way in VR with these devices, and the low cost enables access to the experience for people who literally have no other means to interact with people in this way. For many social VR applications people simply need to be able to look at one another, make eye contact, and be able to explore a virtual space together. A 3dof head tracker with a 3dof controller, if comfortable to wear and easy to set up, can deliver this.

What is a non-starter are dropped frames, overheating, or other issues around comfort and ease of use. All of these are solved by Oculus Go (and a subset are solved by GearVR) in a way that are not solved by google cardboard. If a device can hold up for 60 minutes, doesn't hurt to wear, has no cables or messy setup steps, and includes asynchronous timewarp to generate missing frames, I believe that is a sufficient device that could takeover the market for a wide variety of communication use cases and is exactly what Oculus Go is the first to offer in full.

Certainly I am guilty of deliberately glossing over some of the most functional distinctions between cardboard and more sophisticated setups, but in my view, the lack of positional tracking is so limiting to what can be achieved in software that any VR/AR device without it is permanently relegated to "cool novelty" status and will never be able to pull off a mass-appeal that will create a blockbuster "must have" device.

We're diverging quite a bit from the posted subject matter, but I wonder how the problem of the health impacts will be solved, if ever.