I mean you can speculate all you want on the future sales of VR. My contention in this post has nothing to do with that, but rather your smartphone example. You're talkg about smartphones like the Nokia Communicator which launched in 1996 at $800 USD? Is that honestly a fair comparison? Tell me how many iPhones Apple would have sold in 2007 if Steve Jobs announced the launch price at $1100 ($800 USD with inflation) instead of the $500 it launched at. I bet far less than the 6 million it sold in its first year on the market.

Even still, remember VR isn't new technology. Consumer VR headsets have been available since the early 90's.  Here's the "iGlasses" from 1995 which retailed for less than $1000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNUIwi5F6g&ytbChannel=Hidden%20Below

There was also the VFX-1 that also came out in 1995 for $600. They predicted at the time that VR would be a $6 Billion industry by 2000. Oops.

VR has its place, (a small one). As the Technology gets better so will software.

I was an early adopter of Rift. It was amazing (at first) but it quickly loses its initial good impression and you are often left with an overpriced tech demo.

On a side note....I play Elite Dangerous in VR with Voice Attack, ED Profiler, and other tweeks. With the ED profiler I was able to change hud color options to green, and up Super Sampling. The game runs amazing and it never gets old. ED made my Rift Purchase worth it and I still play it almost everyday.

PSVR has a few titles that I am sure justify the purchase.

Tech is getting better. The new Vive coming out ($799 yikes)....renders I believe 2400 x 1400. That’s amazing, although you need a good rig to power it.

I miss resident evil 7, Wipe out HD omega collection and other triple A games with good VR implementation.

I was talking about early 2000s smartphones. 

And VR was certainly tried before in the 90s, but only by a few small companies. Sega was one of the only big companies actually trying to push VR but they never made it to market. Nintendo definitely weren't doing anything with VR at the time either, since Virtual Boy is not VR.

Which left you with like 3 or 4 small companies shipping products like VFX-1 as you mentioned.

But today, things are very different. You have quite literally the majority of the tech giants working on VR, whereas before hardly any of them did anything related to VR. They're all invested long term as well, knowing full well that this is a market that will take time to grow and they are fully expecting to not turn a profit until later on, though there might be some good surprises like with PSVR being profitable. 

Not to mention the tech now works at a better price point. VFX-1 would be $1000 today, had no positional tracking, had 16x less pixels than today's headsets, had only one 3DoF motion controller without any finger sensing or advanced haptics, ran at a low refresh rate, is heavier, and there was no compelling content at all.

We're going to see the same jump you see from VFX-1 to PSVR in the next 5 years. PSVR compared to a high-end headset in 5 years will feel 20 years apart going off past measures.

VR has massive implications for society and entertainment, not just a small place.

Did you try games like Lone Echo / Echo Arena, Robo Recall, Brass Tactics, The Unspoken? Those are high quality titles with plenty of replayability.

Vive Pro's price is speculation right now, but it's also going to be a blip on the radar compared to gen 2 headsets launching in 2019 / 2020. Those will have far higher resolutions, much more new tech integrated, and likely new lenses, tracking solutions, controllers, and higher FoV.

How many tech giants invested long term in 3D TV technologies? Sony, Samsung, Microsoft, Sharp, LG to name a few. They made specialty 3D TV cameras, created specialty 3D TV channels. Hundreds of millions of dollars was invested in it. In 2010 they were predicting that 87% of American Households would have 3D Blu Ray players by 2015.  They expected to sell 200 million 3D TVs in 2018 alone for a revenue of $23 Billion.

How did that work out?

3D had no where near as much backing as VR. Sure, there were a bunch of big companies routing for it, quite a few actually. But not on the same level as VR.

VR has companies like Sony, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, HTC / Valve, Samsung, Nvidia, AMD, LG, Lenovo, HP, Acer, Dell, Asus, Panasonic, Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei.

Not to mention a lot of the R&D crossed over with AR. So Apple, Magic Leap, Amazon and others working more on the AR side are also working on VR technology in a sense. Light-field displays, computer vision, inside-out tracking, virtual humans and other areas are relevant to both fields. So when you put it like that, the entire tech industry is working on technologies for VR, and a large portion of the tech industry is specifically working on VR.

Also if you've seen what the forecasts are for VR sales, they've all been met so far. Just to give you some examples, Oculus Rift is expected to sell a million lifetime units. This was a goal set back in 2014. Mark Zuckerburg said he is expecting sales in the hundreds of thousands, and one of the higher ups at Oculus set a goal for 1 million. PSVR as you know has only outdone Sony's expectations.

Just the nature of 3D shows limitations in what it offers. Even if you had perfect glasses free 3D that wasn't a resource hog, that's it. It's just going to give you some extra depth for existing content and can't possibly have any brand new content or any applications outside of entertainment. VR is a brand new medium that can fully change the way media works, more than anything that has come before it. Not only can it completely change entertainment, but it also has limitless potential elsewhere.

Did you know that VR is the most social platform that has ever existed? Did you know that it's really useful for education and architecture, tourism, and robotics? There are still many other applications I haven't talked about.

Clearly VR has more potential than 3D in every way. You could even say VR absorbs 3D, since it does 3D on virtual screens better than even an IMAX theater.