When I was little, I never wanted a jetpack. I still don't. My Lego men had jetpacks, and even five-year-old me could see that if you bent their stubby little legs back, the twin jets of flame coming out the back of the engines would melt their plastic feet. Rubbish. When I was little, I wanted virtual reality, like in Tron. And now it's basically here. It even plays Hawken - which basically makes it a jetpack anyway.

Joyless cynics might argue it's not quite Tron yet. VR is still in its teething stage, still an experiment; a bunch of different companies and entrepreneurs flinging ideas and cash at the same problem from different directions, trying to get us closer to our holodeck future. But why now? Why, after years of resignation to arcades and horrors like the Virtual Boy are these start-ups able to challenge billion-dollar companies for control of gamers' living rooms?

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"The technology was not ready," says Palmer Luckey, founder of OculusVR and the inventor of the Oculus Rift. "There have been some pretty great professional grade virtual reality systems, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars - far beyond what most consumers can buy. Making a VR headset takes more than good hardware, but recent advancements in display, sensor and render technology are what made all of this practical."

“ Recent advancements in display, sensor and render technology are what made all of this practical."

The Omni treadmill, for instance, can be used with any game that uses the standard WASD key movement set-up. While playing, gamers can walk, run, sidestep, jump, crouch - the complete first-person athlete's repertoire. And while it works best with a headset like the Rift, players without a VR headset can use it with a regular TV or monitor set-up and a controller - provided they don't turn away from the screen, obviously.

This modular set-up will be typical as home VR grows in popularity - different devices working together to create the best overall experience. "I don't think that everything will converge into a single package or device - the free market will make sure of that," says Luckey. So the question mark hanging over consumer VR technology is which separate systems will combine to create the best virtual experience - and what the stumbling blocks will be along the way.

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For a start, there's the tricky question of physical feedback in a non-physical environment. Which is to say, while in Skyrim my towering Nord hero might be bringing a battleaxe to bone-crunching stop in the face of a howling bandit, in real life my arm's going to keep going on its arc and end with me punching myself in the nethers. Which, you'll recall, doesn't ever happen in The Matrix. And while haptic feedback (little buzzers like you find in phones) might go some of the way towards fixing this problem, Paul Yost - head of YEI Technology and the creator of the PrioVR, which uses a set of straps and motion-tracking sensors to give players highly accurate full-body tracking - thinks it may just be something that players will have to get used to.

“ The human mind is great at adapting to changes in both perception and expectations."

"Even simple games like PacMan don't have 1:1 feedback," says Yost. "The human mind is great at adapting to changes in both perception and expectations. Perhaps future iterations of the PrioVR will include force-feedback systems, but even without those, the human mind is terrific at filling in the gaps."

My towering Nord also faces another problem - he might be too towering for his (or my) own good. "People are sensitive to how tall they should be, which is a problem for most [first-person] games that peg the player as four to five feet tall," says Luckey. It's another strange thought - how would it feel to step into the boots of a character that was ten feet tall, then look down at ourselves to see our feet four or five feet further away than they feel they should be? You can't save the world from dragons if you're tottering about like a baby giraffe on a growth spurt.

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Playing current first-person games on a treadmill like the Omni also raises an interesting problem for - ahem - 'less ambulatory' gamers. Rushing your lithe special forces veteran round Call of Duty for six hours while your real-world body slowly expands to fill the sofa like melting cheese is fine, but clamber onto a treadmill and try doing the same and many players' hearts are going to pop like water balloons.

"Games designed for the Omni can take [the fitness] aspect into account," says Jan Goetgeluk, founder of Virtuix, which makes the Omni treadmill. "[But] games designed for a game controller or keyboard [have never had] to worry about how far the avatar needs to run to complete objectives or travel. Having seats and benches in games will no longer be a novelty, but needed for rests between missions.

"That said," he adds, "you don't always need to play on the Omni; sometimes you just want to sit on a couch and play Skyrim."

More immediate than the issue of fitness for most gamers will be that of price. If you were, today, to purchase the Rift, the Omni and the PrioVR sensor rig (to provide sight, omnidirectional movement and full body-tracking) then your VR set-up alone would cost you $1,148 (based on a $300 developer version of the Rift, a $499 pre-order Omni and the lowest possible Kickstarter pledge that gives the full-body set of PrioVR sensors, $349). That's about £715. And sure, those numbers are a little fudged (only the Omni has a consumer price tag, and even that could change once it passes the pre-order stage), and the cost will drop rapidly as competitors come to market. But it's still enough to make VR, for the moment, a niche luxury rather than a gaming must-have.

Which means that either the cost of VR will have to drop dramatically (which all parties are certain it will, especially once competing products like Sony's own recently-announced VR headset hit the market), or our virtual reality set-ups will have to start doing more than just letting us romp around in video games.

One thing VR could change dramatically is the home office. The Oculus Rift already has several different software tools that turn the headset, effectively, into a replacement computer monitor. And because you're working in a virtual space, you can opt to split the display into as many simulated monitors as you like, like a real-life multiple monitor set-up without the monstrous price tag. According to Luckey, working from a virtual office like this also means an escape from your humdrum, cabinets-and-water-coolers workplace. If you feel like working on a beach today, or in the middle of a forest, there will be a simulation for that. And once the resolution improves to a level to support this kind of use, the tumbling price of hardware could see headsets competing with monitors on price, too.

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Goetgeluk predicts a whole new market waiting for VR adopters: virtual fitness. In an introductory video on the Virtuix Kickstarter page, the developers invite gamers to imagine waking up and going for a jog in Skyrim each morning. Instead of running on a regular treadmill watching Bargain Hunt, or weaving past tutting shoppers on the pavement, Virtuix could offer joggers a lap of the Champs Elysees, a point-to-point race at the bottom of the sea or a power-walking excursion on the surface of Mars.

Finally, outside of the home market, systems like the PrioVR could bring accurate motion-tracking to everyone from artists and musicians to animation studios and indie game developers. Luckey and Yost even talk about 'telepresence' - having someone with a sensor right and headset controlling a robotic body hundreds of miles away. With the addition of accurate finger-tracking (high on the agenda for the PrioVR team), rigs like this could provide enough accuracy to let engineers, rescue workers and so on work without ever putting themselves in harm’s way.

“ Why send firefighters into burning buildings if telerobotic suits can do it more safely?"

"Why fly technicians around the world when they can operate repair bots from a home office?" asks Luckey. "Why send firefighters into burning buildings if telerobotic suits can do it more safely?"

For next-generation virtual reality to succeed where its clunky forebears failed, it has to be more than just an entertainment tool - more than just a novel way of consuming the games we already have. Different technologies will come and go - for every N64 there'll be a Virtual Boy - but in five years time we'll have a market: different competing products driving down prices and ramping up innovation. And with development cycles for triple-A games commonly stretching over three or four years, we'll also have the first generation of built-for-VR games - dedicated software replacing reverse-engineering and jerry-rigging.

"Full body motion-tracking, haptic feedback, eye-tracking and locomotion devices are going to need to get massively better before we can have a proper holodeck," says Luckey. "But getting most of the way there will happen pretty quickly. There are crazy things going on in research labs today; hopefully they will advance enough to start plugging into the Matrix within our lifetime.

"[But] more than that, the most important thing that will improve is software. People have barely scratched the surface in terms of VR game design - the next five years are going to be a wild ride."

Rich Wordsworth is a corporate shill and is in everybody's pocket - even yours. His many paymasters include Official PlayStation, Edge, Play, X360 and NowGamer. Pay him to tweet favourable things about your game here: @rjwordsworth