Virtual Reality has finally caught up to the dreams of fans and creators from the first breakthrough in the late 1980's. So it's fair to say that it is rapidly reaching the point of make or break.
From it's creation in the 60's, to the first leap from military tech and science fiction to science fact in the late 80's to early 90's to it's subsequent demise. To the resurgence of VR as a viable, ie: saleable technology in this decade. But if VR fails this time around there will be no excuses this time. The talent is here. The software framework and the hardware is here. The technology has finally arrived. In the 80's and 90's, during the first VR resurgence, the quality could only be described as primitive at best. With even the fastest computers at the time only able to generate maybe a few hundred polygons fast enough to be displayed and updated in real time. The proponents of Virtual Reality at the time heralding a new era of human/computer interaction, when clearly It was barely nothing more than a proof of concept to everyone else. The public disagreed and VR was consigned to the pages of history.
Augmented reality is the 'boy who cried wolf' of the post-Internet world - it's long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way.
Om Malik
Fast forward 20 some years. To a time now where computers and even mobile computing devices called smartphones have computing power and abilities those VR pioneers of the 80's & 90's would barely be able to comprehend. What would take workstations an hour to do then could now be computed in a fraction of second. The technology to create a virtual world, a viable virtual world is finally here. The old VR experiment far enough in the past to be forgotten by most, and remembered by those there at the time (I myself tried the Virtuality VR system on many occasions in 1990) fondly remembered as, "Oh yes. I remember that."
Now all that is missing is the content. The reason why someone would want to invest in a Virtual Reality system in the first place. Tech demos are not going to cut it. Sure, what can be created now is orders of magnitudes better than before to a point where it can hardly even be compared. But if all it is is pretty pictures, the general public at large will have the exact same reaction and turn their back on it a second and last time.