it is my belief that oculus will sell a lot of devices largely by manipulating the ad copy,
resulting in frustrated people out a lot of money,
i suppose i am attempting to include another perspective on the device,
one that i failed to see before i bought one,
and have yet to see since,
but feel confident in my understanding of it

i suppose it depends on your definition of virtual reality..

but i think the verbiage of vr is very misleading

my position is that if oculus was called: oculus digital stereoscopy; the tech would lose a lot of its hype

as for the tracking it is certainly the best feature of the headset,
again with the goal of calling the thing what it does i refer to the 'head tracking' as 'inferred spherical screen encapsulation'

what the head tracking is doing is windowing your vision to the size of a fisheyed cell phone screen and then inferring your position in a 3d space and displaying the contents of that field of view on the screen,
refreshing the content of the image in regard to the movement of your neck,
giving you the impression that you are in a sphere of flat displays looking through fisheye glasses with blinders with a forced forward stare

when i put it on the restricted periphery and the inability for me to use my eyes to look around was the most dramatic realisation

but that is just dismantling the vr hype,
actual stereoscopy is flawed in its own ways..

peoples eyes differ in distance apart,
the oculus is solid plastic,
certainly the error is measured in mm to fractions of mm but that is still error that your brain now is required to correct,

also the goggles press against your face tightly to seal out distracting ambient light,
this hurts after some time,
and in the case of my watching a film,
completely depleted my eyes of blood leaving white bags under my eyes

that is the hardware

as for the software if you read the comment i linked in the comments you are referring to i talk about an experiment i performed when i first received the oculus that shows that the brain error corrects the inconsistencies between the eye inputs at a pretty substantial distance,
talking here of the blue and pink box experiment,
in the experiment only the pink box moves,
but when i showed it to a friend thae asked why when the two boxes began overlapping did the blue one start moving as well?
i watching this all cloned on the screen in front of me explained that it still was the case that only the pink one moved and the blue one is being moved around by thaer brain,
so if a simple experiment has my brain working overtime shifting still objects it would seem reasonable that a lot of the 'jitter' that is so often talked about when displaying entire worlds is your brain organising its inputs

as for what i believe is the right direction?

if we are talking about visual input manipulation.. i'd think projection, perhaps onto a dome or disc encapsulating the entire eye range including periphery of the eyes even with the pupil extended to the outer most regions of the eye

or one fantasy device i dreamed up used this recent research: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/magnetic-hair-directs-water-f... ; if you watch the video, at the end, 57s in, you can see these hairs bending optics,
what you'd do is have two rows of these hairs, one for each eye and each row bends to follow the movement of a pupil and each hair acts as a pixel

this way simulates two photons bouncing off a single object and reaching the eye, that would be wild

but mind that i referred to the effort as visual input manipulation, if you want to talk vr i think the only possible direction is bypassing our sensors and interacting directly with the processors, a la the suit in Zero Theorem : http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles...