[giantrobot]

> The Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone was about the same size as a VR headset is today.

> Imagine the same improvements are made to VR that were made to phones.

Your missing some important details here. The DynaTAC was the whole telephone. All the electronics and battery were in the unit. The better VR headsets need a giant PC attached to them. Even with the giant PC on mains power and brick of a headset top of the line VR experiences are pretty lackluster.

What you're talking about isn't going from the DynaTAC to the iPhone. You're talking about a giant PC on mains power with a brick of a VR headset and shrinking it to just a headset (or glasses) powered by a battery. Even if you set your VR baseline to the fully detached headsets they're not at a fully usable by normal people state.

While it's not impossible to go from the giant PC on mains power, it's unlikely to be happening in the near term. The DynaTAC was battery powered so it was a continuum of development from it to an iPhone. The DynaTAC was a user device for an existing and well developed telephone system (infrastructure and services). VR still doesn't even have that everyday use case let alone the technology to make it really workable.

This is all the more challenging because today's technology is pushing up against hard physical limits. Today's GPUs on mains power with at the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing are hard pressed to render 4K resolution at consistently high framerates. Mobile GPUs aren't even close. So there's still a lot of question marks between today and "realistically usable VR" and a whole lot more between that an VR sunglasses.