Your understanding of VR is rudimentary at best. The initial VR labs not only used telepresence gloves and head/eye tracking, they often used bizarre omnidirectional treadmills and the like. Even on a consumer level things were substantially more advanced than that. Hell, I had someone bequeath me one of these two years ago, and it was three years old then: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Reality-P5-Gaming-Glove/dp/B... "Little more than putting a screen really close to your face" is a dismissive overview of the sheer amount of widgetry thrown at the problem, only to provide exactly zero consumer adoption.
Ok. I admit, I was unfairly dismissive. Back in the day I was genuinely geeked about VR. And then there was silence, and then Lawn Mower Man, and then more silence. As I said in my comment to scarp, maybe something like the Kinect could remove the widgetry barrier, and maybe that could do the trick?
Something to keep in mind: I graduated college in 1999, and we had a 3d printer. It was not rudimentary. It was expensive. You used it for what 3d printers were intended for: rapid prototyping of objects that you intended to produce using another medium and manufacturing process. As far as rapid prototyping goes, the decrease in price of 3d printers has been a boon. The world is just now waking up to the fact that you can "make things" with them but has yet to twig to the reality that you can't "make useful things" with them. Nintendo had a "Power Glove" in 1989. Every objection anybody has had to it has been knocked clear away by technology. Yet we haven't gone back. Nintendo, inventors of the Wii and most of the new interactivity in video games, hasn't even hinted at VR. The Kinect allows you to do motion capture on the cheap. Thing is, almost nobody has any real use for mocap. A friend of mine is shooting a movie with his twin two-year-old daughters and invading aliens; he's using a hacked kinect to provide his motion capture for the aliens and yeah, that's pretty fucking cool. It also requires full mastery of Avid and AfterFX, not to mention Poser and a few other, more esoteric titles that the average dude isn't going to just roll together. Could they? Probably. But people have been using game engines to create videos for half a decade now and they really haven't caught on. 3d printing is a tool, not a 2nd coming. Some tools are cooler than others - the reciprocating saw, in my opinion, radically transformed construction and heavy home maintenance. Got a zip saw and an ugly blade? Fuck the chainsaw; the zip is way more efficient, way safer, and way less stinky, smelly and noisy. But they haven't exactly busted out of Home Depot. If you need to cut a lot of brush, or you need to cut up a car, or you need to cut up a partition wall, you know what you need. But people aren't trying to figure out all the cool things they can do with a reciprocating saw just because they exist.
My electric chainsaw is awesome for cutting branches, but I should have gotten the zip saw. You might be right about 3D printing. But, I hope not.