Maybe it's just me but I'm much more excited about Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality.
Recently I was looking for a new place to rent, and in every place I visited I kept trying to picture in my mind how my existing furniture would fit (and look) in the new space. It was so mentally tiring. I wish AR was advanced enough such that the rental agent would simply hire me a pair of AR glasses, I could log in to an account to load my existing furniture data, and project it into the empty rooms to rotate/rearrange/etc.
It's not just you, but AR is harder than VR, and has a longer "basic" feature list. Transparent screens, world tracking, world occlusion, object recognition / classification - plus the mobile VR issues of portable computing power and battery life.
VR will pave the way for a lot of the authoring technologies, and then those techs will (I mean, they already are) get adjusted for AR.
2) As antisocial as staring at your iPhone is, VR is much worse. You can't even function in the environment you are physically in because your body thinks it's somewhere else.
I think VR is really interesting, don't get me wrong, but it's not the next app platform. Yes it suits gaming really well if you don't get sick, but Augmented Reality is the next iPhone, and we are probably many years away from doing it right. We're not even at the T-Mobile Sidekick stage yet.
I would buy a discrete AR headset like I'd buy a smartphone, but I can't see myself buying a VR headset for anything other than setting aside an hour or so to be entertained.
Recently I was looking for a new place to rent, and in every place I visited I kept trying to picture in my mind how my existing furniture would fit (and look) in the new space. It was so mentally tiring. I wish AR was advanced enough such that the rental agent would simply hire me a pair of AR glasses, I could log in to an account to load my existing furniture data, and project it into the empty rooms to rotate/rearrange/etc.