It won't go away. There are too many practical uses. Just today I had a conversation with someone regarding how Van Gogh paintings are so much better in real life. Once VR can faithfully recreate 3-D depth perception, virtual experiences will take off, mark my words.

Uh, can't it already? There's a reason why it has a screen for each eye… depth perception should be mathematically perfect.

Fair point, and that got me thinking of what depth perception in VR lacks, which is the ability for you to naturally change the focal point. This reminded me of Lytro cameras and light field photography. I'd like to be able to see this. I can imagine technology that could change the focal point on the fly based on changes detected in your eyes, but that will probably be further down the road.

In the shorter term resolution and detail will certainly be ratcheted up, and VR experiences' popularity will increase as this happens.

The focal point issue is the main reason why 3D movies haven't taken off. However, games have a much better chance of using this technology because focal points can only be done for a single person, not 100 people in a theater.

Eventually that could help with performance too. If the game can know where your focus is and render high quality assets there with lower quality at the fringes . . . supposing they can switch between those assets quickly enough, which I guess might be a challenge given how quickly eyes can move around and switch focus.

Fair point, and that got me thinking of what depth perception in VR lacks, which is the ability for you to naturally change the focal point.

If you were to change your focal point while wearing a VR headset, everything would go out of focus. Your eyes MUST focus on the screen. All light is coming from something basically the same distance from your eye.

I think you are talking about where your eyes converge, which is where you choose to have the eyes' two images overlap.

In real life, you almost always focus and converge on the thing you are looking at. With stereoscopic 3D, you focus on the screen, and converge your eyes on whatever virtual plane the object you wish to look at is. Unless the game renders depth of field, or has extreme depth requiring your eyes to point outward (toward the ears), then you should be able to converge on any object you wish without trouble.

It is actually kind of amazing that we can focus and converge on separate things at all, given this ability is unnatural. The requirement to do so is inherent to stereoscopic 3D and cannot be worked around, as long as the light is coming into your eye from a fixed distance (a movie screen, or the LCDs in your headset). It is something you get better at after a while. If you can do Magic Eye, you are golden.