All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. The boom and bust of half-assed VR tech is inevitable. You'd think the spectacular flop of 3D TV sets, and the subsequent jump to "curved" in a desperate bid to give idiots a reason to upgrade their TV, would give you some clues how technology in these sectors works.
I have an Oculus Rift DK2 and Leap Motion setup at home currently, and I've played pretty much every worthwhile title, and far too much Alien Isolation with it. I can confidently say that it still has a long, long, long way to go. Not only does it suck quite profoundly and tend towards nausea inducing 4th wall shattering graphical problems, but developers simply haven't stepped up to the plate and figure out how to make VR work yet.
Not one single game really played with the idea that you could fundamental distort the wearers perception and really screw with their mind. Even the much touted Sightline: The Chair was lukewarm at best, despite it's clever omission of any controls other than simply looking around.
The silly immersion breaking hand-held split analog controllers are just nonsense. I just can't get excited about the idea of VR being used Call of Duty: Crappy Teenage Wank Fest.
The best experience I've had thus far is when the Leap Motion/DK2 combo really felt like it was working. In the demo "Weightless" you're floating inside a space station, and fiddling with random bits of junk floating around with you. It uses the Leap Motion mounted on the front of the DK2 to track your hands, and under exactly the right circumstances it's very, very profoundly disturbing and hauntingly realistic. You can hold your real hands in front of your face, and see your virtual tendons flex ( actually it's probably just shoddy animation, but it looks good enough ) as you bend each finger and thumb in turn. Out of all the junky pointless jump-scare tat demos out there, this stood apart as something truly and profoundly indicative of what's to come- in 10-20 years, not 1-2.
Yes, the horrible shoddy over marketed, cheap jump-scare ridden, idiot youtuber promoted godawful shite that constitutes VR technology is, unfortunately, the gateway to the real stuff we'll be using in 10-20 years. That's a sad but inevitable truth of progression- remember Windows Mobile? You've got to trawl knee deep through shit before you get to the gold.
I can only hope that Microsoft paying attention to VR will solve some of the complexities of getting it fired up, and perhaps replace all the disparate technologies with something to canonicalise on, like DirectX: VR. I could live with that. At the moment, the spaghetti mess of wires, and the shoddy awful software that gets the DK2 up and running is taxing, and having to pay for more dubious third party software to get VR in games which don't explicitly support it also sucks.
I've no idea how any of what I've said relates to the bulk of this thread ( I didn't read up, booo! ), but that's my two cents on VR. Those of us who buy into it earlier are dealing with pure suckitude, but it will encourage the market to make something worthwhile.
Why OR/Facebroke haven't bought Leap Motion and integrated it right into the Rift beats me. Although you can't even plug the Leap Motion into the Rift's auxiliary USB port since the bandwidth just isn't up to scratch and it just craps itself.