We won't get VR force feedback for a long time. With AR you could turn a laser tag arena into almost any scenario and incorporate a lot of physical elements.

AR lets you bring virtual experiences into a more ad hoc setting. You can't really play a VR game while waiting for the bus but you could be feeding your AR pet.

For a long time I've wanted VR-like games, but played in the freedom of AR, where it maps and adapts to your environment. This would allow you to actually move around and interact with your space.

I briefly played the HoloLens AR game where you have to shoot at robotic bugs that crawl out from your walls.[1] The fact that I could duck behind my office partition was awesome. The fact that when I blew a hole in my wall I could see the "studs" behind it was similarly cool.

In an ideal world, I could trace out my house and play up and down the stairs. Or go to a field or forest and play in a whole other world.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29xnzxgCx6I

Custom Home Mapper is a current Quest project in this vein. It’s VR rather than AR, you map out your whole area (with walls and furniture) and then play some mini-games in it.

To focus on positive potential: Augmented hearing, like tuning into parts of frequency spectrum and directional amplification. Augmented vision with integrated maps, 'scouting' around with street view. Visualizing music with colors. Remote socializing with even less friction. Surrounding yourself with contextual spatial information - food recipes next to stove and PDFs around working desk. Completely new forms of media content, like TV series that follows you around.

It's predictable that big players will want to control every aspect of AR because it gets them complete attention while device is on. Facebook has already pounced. I'm more interested in VR/AR that is in service of user and that means open source.

VR is simply a stepping stone. AR is the real future.

But that's not to say that fully immersive experiences have no future. I just don't think VR will fully take off until it's available in a small form-factor, and likely combined with AR in the same device.