I'm all for VR Tech taking off. I'm an old schooler who remembers the push in the 90's for VR Tech. Bought a VictorMAXX for the Genesis... it wasn't true VR and didn't have 3-d games, but did "track" your head movement with a left/right pole that would send those commands to your controller as you turned your head.... so was kind of fun for some first person shooter stuff. I also remember the Arcade VR pods and trackers that were cutting edge back then, but weighed a ton and took up space.
Given the amount of advances in mobile tech available to detect your head movements, gyroscopes, cost improvements and processing power for portable devices, I'm a little disappointed in the current offerings. This thing is a little expensive for what might be little more than a cellphone you strap on your face. If 3-D and tracking is the main goal, then just sell an IR light bar you slap on your phone and stream video to it. Then you can buy one of those $10 cardboard box VR things and strap that on your face.
Why not integrate a way to track your head movement into the headset with a built in camera that tracks the room as you move your head, or your hands or other objects as you move them in front of you? An external camera that tracks you? Misread the 100 degrees field of view versus the 360 degrees of movement tracking at first... but still not a big deal to run lights around your head. Hopefully they at least extend it to allow multiple devices to connect to the system for multi-player or interactive experiences...
Not a MS fanboy, but seeing the HoloLens is much more impressive to me and where I hope things advance towards more quickly. Everything being built in to the device itself, project completely over, or onto the environment, tracking of your hand and objects and rendering in 3-D. Though I have to wonder how well that looks in comparison to the "individual image to each eye" method of these headsets. Slap on a simple communication/sharing protocol (or use existing standards) and then people can link together and share the same object field of view.
So the 3-D VR headsets we are seeing like Oculus, Sony and others where you strap it on your head and still rely on external devices to track/change your view is a small step forward, but not much more of an advancement than those stereoscopic photo viewers, or the antique "3-d movie" flip versions of them they have in penny arcades and museums. Not saying seeing stuff in 3-D isn't cool, but just not where I thought we be today.