I'm a little surprised VR tech isn't more advanced than it is. I used to work in Product Development for a large PC manufacturer in the 90s and I played around with a few headsets. I remember playing Descent with the CyberMax headset back in the mid 90s, I remember it was hard getting used to that moving your head only moved your view and not the pointing of the spaceship, I'd turn and see a robot coming for me and start firing but i wasn't firing at the robot because my ship was still pointed the other direction, needed to move the joystick to re-position the ship, but I got used to it. There were only a very few games that had any VR support, and that is the big problem I think. To get traction there needs to be a killer app/game that makes enough people say "I really could use that", and not just "That's cool".

I really thought VR would be much farther along by now.

It's not something everyone has so anything about it is 'cool'. Everyone wants a holodeck. Articles on it get lots of clicks.

It will probably take a while until any of these gadgets reach a level that's even remotely comparable to a Sci-Fi holo-deck though.

As for the Oculus, I guess it's more of an in-between stage. Kind of a casual VR simulator, that doesn't require the effort and resources of a full VR simulation, but still has the potential to create a more intense experience than normal video games or movies.

RCT3 works as well. You need some 3rd party software that forces VR on older games. I can't remember the name. Also, get a good fan :)

nope - the current consumer VR stuff is very much a forced perception against a natural one. In my own experience, its utterly horriffic and far devoid from natural vision (skewed as that natural vision may be - in my case due to injury).

consider that if I look at a lamp-post 20 metres away, my eyes gauge upon a lamp-post 20 metres away. with VR they gauge upon a screen / display rather close to my face. no amount of effects will change that. if they do, then theres an issue with the tech in the long run!

Depends on the game, but head tracking is nice in FPS games and gives some really good advantages to players that have the hardware. I have a NaturalPoint TrackIR 4 Pro which I've used with ArmA games and there are a number of advantages the hardware provides to the serious FPS gamer. One is that you can be running in one direction while turning your head to scout for enemies. That is particularly useful while reloading your weapon or while running down the side of a wall, so that you can maximize your field of view to look for the enemy instead of seeing a wall cover half the screen. Another advantage is minimizing your body profile while peeking over a ridge while prone. With the head tracker, you turn your in-game head to look around and your body profile is hidden. Without the head tracker, your entire body turns in the direction you look - exposing your entire body to the sides and creating a lot more movement. With human opponents this is particularly effective at making it more difficult for you to be spotted. Another benefit is being able to run up to a corner and actually peek around the corner with your head for real. Most people end up doing that unconsciously while playing due to game immersion, only when you have the proper hardware - it actually works for real which is nice.

As for how to look around quickly, the head tracking hardware has a configurable movement scaling factor. When you're looking at a fixed desktop type display, in order to see the game your eyes have to always be able to see the monitor so obviously you can't turn your head around 180 degrees in real life to see behind you as you would no longer be looking at the monitor anymore so you wouldn't see what was happening. The TrackIR implements movement scaling/acceleration to handle this and you can configure it per-game per-axis, so you decide what the maximum degrees left or right you are comfortable turning your head while still being able to view the display, and what level of in-game head turning you want that angle to represent. So for example if you decide 45 degrees left/right movement is comfortable you can then decide that 45deg of real head movement will translate to 180 degrees of in-game head movement, so you turn your head 45 degrees left or right and you are now in-game looking behind yourself. No doubt each piece of hardware will have options to configure this sort of thing custom to the individual game to tailor it to both the game and the player. TrackIR has a fancy program to calibrate this functionality until you're comfortable with it.

How well these type of features will work in reality heavily depends on the individual game, the hardware one has and the configurability of the software it comes with, whether a game has native support for the hardware that is good or has to use some external hack/mod that may or may not be a great experience, but it also depends on the individual player and their expectations, whether they experience vertigo or other uncomfortable experiences with the hardware, whether they have any eye, neck or other physical problems that would make such hardware difficult or impossible to use properly (bad astigmatism for example). It also depends on how people's emotions are triggered by such immersive environments and how they react to that. It could be a very pleasurable experience for some, and very terrifying or sickening to others.

In short, I think it's going to be a very individual experience that some people greatly love while others strongly dislike, much like 3D movies at the theatre. I have to admit though personally I am anxiously awaiting the Oculus Rift and can't wait to try it out with Skyrim and dozens of other games, I love this sort of technology and look forward to ways to improve my gaming experience with this stuff. In the mean time I manage to have some fun with the TrackIR in games that support it (mostly flight games/sims, racing games/sims, and a handful of FPS shooters like ArmA series). It is truly a breathtaking and immersive experience for me anyway.

Some TV show made an expensive highly custom VR tent for Battlefield 3 a few years ago. If you search Youtube for "Battlefield 3 simulator" or something like that you can probably find it, it was pretty amazing. Video displays all the way around, with a special piece of hardware on the floor to run on that forces you back to the center constantly, with motion trackers, real simulated gun, and you even get shot by paintballs when you get hit in game. It was pretty wild, but it was just an experiment they did for fun. They got a military guy to test-run in it and he was pretty blown away by how real it felt, seemed like a lot of fun. Must have cost them a fortune for all the hardware though! :)

I´d say you don´t need any of those things to create a holodeck. Just one device that interacts with your brain. All that you perceive from the "real world" is taken from body sensors and then processed in the brain, given a sufficiently advanced technology that allows to remotely interact with the brain and input artificial sensory impulses, you´d basically would see, smell, feel, taste and hear whatever the computer would be programmed to.
A holodeck is not something so far-fetched, it´s just that our current science isn´t at the level to develop such a device.

I recall I was gifted a book when I was a child that depictured lots of inventions and technologies that could happen in the future. I looked at it and was amazed at the futuristic things that were depicted and explained how´d they work. I always thought how fascinating would the future be with those, almost like the sci-fi movies I used to watch at that time.
Funny thing is........years and years passed and when I was tyding up the bookcase I found the book. I started to flip through the pages, recalling how awesome it looked at the time and to my amazement, most of the inventions in the book were actually being used or developed.
So when I hear people saying something is impossible..........I just can´t help it but grin. :P

As always, technology need time to be perfected as well as cost need time to be lowered to be accessable to many people. Maybe 5 to 10 years later......

As I posted before, on the Rift I had to use my glasses to get a clear view, so clearly the lenses focus the light on my eyes as if it's at a distance. If my eyes were looking at a display that's close to my face, I wouldn't have been able to see them well either with or without my glasses, since they would have been too close. If they were looking at a scene some tens of centimetres away, it would have looked sharp without glasses, which is the case with the Samsung Gear prototype I tried.

So while the two offer different experiences, neither of them looks like a display that's where the display really is.

I haven´t tried a VR set myself, so can´t say how it looks.
Though "in real life" when you look at a lamp-post 20 meters away, you aren´t seeing a lamp-post 20 meters away but the light reflected off the surface of the object 20 meters away. :D
In other words, distance wouldn´t matter as long as the light decay and absortion by hitting, reflecting off the surface and travelling through air is calculated right, when it touches the eye sensors. If the photons have the same energy when they touch your eye, from a real world object at 20 meters or a virtual one at 2cm, the eye would perceive the light the same way, hence, you could trick the brain into perceiving a fake distance. Given though that the eye focuses on a plane with fixed distance, the focus aspect would have to be rendered to the lenses.

This is totally theoretical though.

*fixes 2-layer aluminum paper hat*

A Matrix mind plug is something entirely different than a holodeck,
of course it would theretically be possible to implant such a port into your brain, but I'd never want to have such a thing.

Actually a Matrix like plug would be another way of VR though I wasn´t referring to that.
What I meant is a device that remotely, that is wirelessly passes data into your brain, you yourself would walk physically in a state of awareness in an empty room but as the device passed sensory data into your brain it´d make you believe you see, hear, taste, feel and smell, things that aren´t there but that your brain creates.
Another way would be to realize that half-way that is a 3D holoprojector would create phisically the objects in the room, so you´re actually seeing those with your eyes, 3D spatial sound from multiple embedded speakers on the walls would create the pinpointed sounds, but feeling would be passed through wirelessly to your brain.