[purplelobster]

That's a very good analogy. Just don't underestimate how quickly the tech can progress in this day and age, I did that mistake myself. Less than two years ago I was very excited about the Rift and bought a dev kit. As someone who works in computer vision etc, I was convinced though that good tracking would be many years out, and then suddenly there were the lighthouse solution from Valve. Now I've had the same thought about inside-out tracking (by means of vision), but even that seems to be arriving much faster than I initially anticipated. Today every big tech company from MS, Google, Facebook, to Valve, and hardware companies such as Samsung, HTC and Nvidia/ATI manufacturers are pushing hard on every frontier of VR. I agree the form factor has to change to allow mass adoption, but expect much faster progress than what happened with phones in the 80s.