I'm excited for VR on the Web (i.e. using the Web as a deployment platform for VR). It necessitates finally pulling through on the promise of HTML5. Remember, back when the iPhone was first released, there was no app store for 3rd party apps. It was supposed to be all HTML5 apps. But at the time, HTML5 couldn't do enough to make it worthwhile. Today, there are very few things I can't do in the browser that I can do as a "native" app.

As for the Web on VR (using VR to render Web content), I think it's unlikely that we're going to be reading HN in an Oculus Rift anytime soon. Again, I go back to the example of the smartphone. Most of the activity has been around making new classes of apps that work best in the form factor. No shit, Sherlock. We're not going to see any serious effort to adapt our current understanding of the Web to VR, and I'm completely fine with that. We will, however, see new designs on the Web that can upgrade or degrade as needed between VR and 2D displays. People poo-poo'd the mobile web, disbelieving we'd ever fit a site designed for the desktop on such a tiny screen. And then we invented responsive design. The Web on VR will have it's own responsive design patterns.

This stuff about "markup languages for Minecraft" is... I think kind of lacking in vision, because you don't need VR to make that happen, nor is it even a thing that anyone actually wants. Markup is text, text is 2D, and 2D and 3D mesh poorly. I think it's why 3D desktop metaphors never worked: because they were all mapped to 2D user interaction devices. And there is a reason you don't program on your smartphone (in general, actually I manage it on occasion, tweaks to my site in an emergency), because there isn't a keyboard worth doing it. VR is going to make keyboarding too difficult for most people. A certain class of VR form factors (the smartphone-based ones) are going to make it impossible. And that's actually a good thing, because they open up new possibilities in free-roaming, augmented reality in the process.

Carpenter gets into one of my biggest problems with the development community with regards to VR right now, "95Hz is what the baseline is for presence." No it isn't. That's Oculus Rift marketing material to get everyone thinking of Oculus Rift as the Porsche of VR hardware. Currently, they are, but they're trying to establish a brand expectation. I am seeing a lot of people completely avoid VR because "it's not 95Hz yet" or "the latency, the latency, THE LATENCY!", like it's going to hurt them. Yeah, things are a little rough right now, but it's mostly on the developers now to make good looking graphics. The hardware is mostly there. We used to say "60Hz is the baseline for smooth video in gaming" and then went right on playing at 30-45Hz, as much as our machines would handle. If you wait for the hardware to get the rest of the way there (and it will, it doesn't have far to go), then you'll miss the boat.

Yes, faster framerates and lower latency are always better. Don't come at me quoting some study you were not involved with at all talking about experiences you never had. There is a difference between virtual reality--where we talk about nebulous concepts like "presence"--and stereoscopic view apps--where you're still looking at a display. If you want to talk about VR, there is a hell of a lot more to it than just frame rate and latency, and a lot of people are completely ignoring that there is still a lot of work to do in simple things like matching the right field of view for any given user, satisfying body awareness, motion sensing, working with 3D ambient-audio, or even just plain making an app that is interesting and fun to use, regardless of whether or not it's VR.

And even if you don't go for full VR, there is still a lot to do with stereoscopic view apps. I think most people who will end up developing apps for stereo-displays will end up making stereoscopic view apps rather than VR apps, just because it's so much easier, especially right now with the state of the art in interaction devices and development tools for VR being so thin. A traditional, mouse-and-keyboard- or gamepad-oriented FPS-style game with cartoony graphics and a stereo view is not VR but it's still a lot of fun. You don't need 95hz for that.