Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey has never been shy about sharing his vision for the potential of virtual reality (VR) technology to create wholly new experiences and computing interfaces. But some off-the-cuff statements Luckey made in the halls of PAX East last weekend have got one far-reaching question buzzing around many tech and gaming industry watchers today—will VR ever be so good that it makes traditional panel displays all but obsolete?

Luckey certainly seems to think so. Speaking to Maximum PC after a panel on the state of PC gaming, the Oculus founder (and new Facebook employee) gave it about 20 years before today's flat panels are a thing of the past.

"I think there's almost no way traditional displays will be around in a couple decades," Luckey told the site. "Why in the world would you buy a 60-inch TV that, even if it were dirt cheap for that, it's still going to cost a lot to ship it and make it from raw materials? A VR headset is going to be much better and much cheaper, and you can take it anywhere."

It seems ridiculous to think that VR displays will get so good that there's no longer demand for the billions of traditional flat-panel LCDs that make up the core of all our modern electronics. But you have to remember just how long 20 years is in terms of modern technology.

Think back to 1994. Imagine someone telling you back then that, in the world of 2014, mobile telephone technology would be so good that consumers would be dropping landlines in droves for pocket-sized phones that serve as mini-computers. Imagine the 1994 version of you hearing that it would be nearly impossible to find a record store or Blockbuster video on the streets in 2014 because people simply download the entertainment they want on demand. Think of how someone in 1994 would react to professional photographers largely giving up film cameras for high-quality digital imaging, or common consumer-level software that speaks with and understands human voice, or 3D graphics in video games that look many times better than anything in Toy Story. Actually, don't tell them that last part—Toy Story was still a year away in 1994.

The point is that a lot can change in 20 years, technologically, and that the world of 2034 is thus practically inconceivable from our current vantage point. There's a decent argument to be made that the next 20 years of tech progress will be even more rapid than the last 20 as well, meaning we have even less idea what things will be like in two decades than we had back in 1994.

Luckey has made similar arguments about the future advancement of VR in the past. In an interview last September, he told Ars that it would probably take an 8K display (that is, 4320 lines of vertical resolution) on each eye for VR images to start approaching the fidelity of actual reality. What's more, he argued that this kind of headset display technology was probably not insanely far off. "It sounds ridiculous, but HDTVs have been out there for maybe a decade in the consumer space, and now we're having phones and tablets that are past the resolution of those TVs," he said at the time. "So if you go 10 years from now, 8K in a [head-mounted display] does not seem ridiculous at all."

In other words, as Luckey put it to MaximumPC this weekend, "It's really primitive what we have right now. It's finally good enough where people can see themselves using it, but it's not where we need it to be to be really mass market."

Virtual reality versus augmented reality

Of course, pointing out that technology will inevitably get better isn't enough on its own to show that virtual reality will displace current display technology. But Luckey thinks VR also has inherent economic advantages because of the sheer scale of the physical material needed for a VR headset versus a panel display.

"The reason that VR is almost certainly going to displace traditional displays is because, to have real displays, if you want to cover a certain field of view, you literally have to have them physically there," he told MaximumPC. "[With VR], you can simulate it. Once you can get to the pixel density of a real monitor looking straight forward, you can have the simulated pixel density of a hundred monitors all around you.

"A traditional display, especially larger ones, they're very expensive to manufacture and ship... it's literally just a lot of plastic and a lot of glass in a big box that has to be shipped across the world," he continued. "Sometimes it breaks, then it has to sit on a giant store shelf until someone buys it. Once VR is commoditized, let's say 10 years from now, the tech from two years prior, you'll be able to buy a really good VR headset for $99, because there's not much material, once it's all commoditized..."

It's a decent argument, but advances in projector or traditional panel technology could also easily make ultra-thin wall-sized displays cheaper and more efficient in the next decade. Virtual reality might still have an edge, though, because a headset will be able to project an apparent image seemingly in mid-air where there isn't even a surface for a traditional display to sit on. Don't discount the stereoscopic 3D effect either, which is much more robust on a headset with a separate image for each eye than on a flat display that tries to filter out certain images from one eye or the other.

Virtual reality's big disadvantage over more traditional displays, on the other hand, is that its current incarnation forces you to block out your view of the real world around you. No matter how compelling and realistic the VR experience gets, it's not going to become a mass market, TV-and-monitor-displacing technology if using it requires ignoring everyone and everything else in the room.

Luckey addressed this concern somewhat with MaximumPC, talking about how many people can "virtually watch the same screen in a virtual environment" if that's what they want to do. But that ignores all the other things you might want to keep an eye on in your immediate vicinity while using a display, from a crying baby to an overflowing pot on the stove to a burglar sneaking through the back door. Having to fully disconnect from the VR world to even glance at these kinds of real-world concerns probably makes VR a non-starter for most people.

That's why any virtual reality that's going to even have a chance of becoming the de facto display of the future must be closer to augmented reality than to today's Oculus Rift. Users will need to somehow see the real world around them and the apparent virtual world at the same time, either through a sort of translucent display medium or a 3D camera that superimposes a high-quality image of your surroundings into the experience. We're not even close to any consumer-grade products that do this kind of thing all that well yet, but there are plenty of people working on it, not least of which is Google and its Glass project.

In 20 years, that technology could conceivably make a cell phone-level jump from nearly nonexistent to completely common. In the world of 2034, any tech-head worth their salt might be wearing a flexible piece of plastic that looks a bit like a pair of wraparound sunglasses, only without any visible frames. The translucent, super-high-resolution images projected onto that display could represent a shared 3D virtual environment projected on top of the real world. Everyone in the room would see that virtual world from their own position and viewing angle, all updated wirelessly with no noticeable latency or lag after movement.

In a world where technology like this is abundant and cheap, relying on a physical monitor or TV to display information would indeed start seeming obsolete, even if the inertia of the legacy technology would keep it going for a while longer. There's no guarantee that technology will actually get us to this point in a mere couple of decades, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. But whatever trajectory technology takes, it's worth encouraging people like Luckey to see past the current state of the art and try to conceive the almost inconceivable future of 20 years hence.