My point is that outside of hardcore gaming (and a few other specialty uses), AR can perform all of VR’s uses, but VR can’t match AR and degrades nonaugmented events by trying to shoe horn it in. By contrast, AR augments those events.

So the bet that VR will be massive, and particularly that it will be larger than AR, seems unlikely.

I think it will have a place — in the same way high end gaming rigs currently do, but not even at the level of penetration video game systems have, and certainly not like cellphones.

By contrast, AR seems to be on track to be as common as cellphones.

With that, I can agree. AR will definitely be bigger at some point, because it can in principle be used in any scenario. It's meant to augment, not replace.

That said, let's remember that AR today does not exist. HoloLens demos barely qualify as AR. Google Glass was essentially a trimmed down ~2006 feature phone blocking some of your FOV. And before someone says this, Ingress and Pokémon Go do not qualify. It's not really AR until you can overlay images on top of the real world, and until those images are contextually relevant.

With the current trends I see in both spaces, VR has plenty of space to explode before AR becomes ubiquitous, or even usable.

If you think of VR as piping in new sensory data, it’s easier to see how it will be massive.

Mayo Clinic has a page on how deaf people can hear these days by tapping into the auditory portion of the brain stem.

While this may be a specific use case, it is a rather typical social interaction to shared media and it is something that will challenge VR for some time. It will be interesting to see how broadband addresses in-person communication like touch and pheromones.