Well I can only say what I felt and feel. I'll try and describe.

First VR set I tried was driven by a powerful (for the time), expensive, Unix workstation, or may even have been a pair of them, one for each eye. Whatever the best graphics Sun or SGI offered at the time it had, ie the expensive option. It was intended as a technology exploration and dev kit for the "coming soon" huge wave of arcade and home VR systems. A wave that never arrived outside of a couple of rubbish arcade machines, and the awful, but massively hyped "VR is here", film Lawnmower Man.

Hand tracking was there - you got special gloves. Headset tracking was there too, and worked flawlessly. The graphics were clearly orders of magnitude different, as was latency. The level of hype is about the same too, with similar absurd predictions back then as this feature article! Yet the reaction was one of "ooh, neat demo", just as my reaction to Oculus was "ooh, neat demo". Then happy to put it back on the shelf until it's ready. Still just as much a gimmick as 3D tv is to the sibling commenter and me.

The limitations were the same, just scaled up. Headsets are annoyingly heavy still, enough to quickly distract (well oculus was/is) and hugely limit my wish to use. The first set was this, and more. Obviously with added cable harnesses. Both about as attractive in the home as sitting on my sofa with my motorcycle crash hat on, just now we have a fairly lightweight full face helmet. Nowhere near as forgettable as wearing a pair of specs or a baseball cap.

They still cause feelings of sub-nausea for some that better latency was meant to fix, yet didn't, weird isolation, and a feeling that it's almost, but not quite there. Current incarnation is clearly much nearer than back then. Yet it's funny, it felt, going on my fallible memory of the demo we played with that it would be there "quite soon" back then. I feel just the same now. So that quite soon turns out to be very, very subjective. I think that must have been the impression of most of us as the company didn't come close to buying, but it was certainly a talking point in the following weeks. They spent plenty on unnecessary and absurdly expensive toys just because they could or that might be the next interesting thing to develop for. Yet didn't on that.

So they seem destined to stay something that's a niche gaming addon, or niche industrial use like working on something remotely because it's on the sea floor or in a nuclear plant etc. The niches are clearly bigger, and you no longer need a brace of £20k workstations, but still to my eyes not likely to break out of those niches any time soon. If the killer game(s) arrived for VR I'd probably buy one and it would get used to play an occasional hour of those games. Yet those killer apps still haven't arrived, I think because for most a mouse, joystick or controller is more than enough. It's still more a tech to get me a divorce than of the family room. :)

We have a long way to go for the games that transplant you, the relative in Australia sitting on your sofa in place of Facetime calls, or eventually the Holodeck in every home. That seems like the point VR might actually become mainstream. I suspect I won't still be around.