This comes somewhere on the tech tree after "practical flying cars" and "solving world hunger." But eventually, sure, why not.
> That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?
The most common and superficial health issue with VR (and AR) would be simulator sickness. The visual cues don't match what the brain expects via other sense data, so you get sick. It happens to some people much more easily than others.
More direct hazards:
Safety issues, e.g. tripping on stuff you can't see while operating a VR headset, or being distracted due to virtual stimuli.
Vision impairment, primarily in children younger than 6-10 years, but potentially also in older users with compromised vision systems.
Temporary visual impairment, typically after sessions longer than 20 minutes. Pronounced eyestrain due to unnatural focal behavior, object tracking, display quality, and optical alignment.
Nice papers to read:
Costello, "Health and Safety Issues associated with Virtual Reality - A Review of Current Literature" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.3...
Viire, "Health and safety issues for VR". It gets cited around lots even though it's over 10 years old now, but I couldn't find a free copy. Look it up on ACM if you have access. You can preview the first page at the following URL. http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machine...
Stanney, "Realizing the full potential of virtual reality: human factors issues that could stand in the way." Starts on page 39 of the following PDF. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232654060_Pen-based_...
You'll note that these are all late 90s. VR research was much better funded then. You can find more recent stuff though, at least with appropriate database access. More work did get done, but shoehorned under different keywords since "virtual reality" stopped being trendy.
> You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech. (from sibling's child)
Nope. The main difference between 10 year old VR headsets and the ones you can buy today is that the use of bulky CRT eyepieces vs. LED-based eyepieces. The middle ground being LEDs with gradually improving dot pitch.
The human issues remain more or less the same, seeing as nobody has re-engineered the human body in the last 10 years.
My grad advisor had been involved in VR & AR research going back - I forget, 20 or 30 years. So I did a fair amount of reading on the topic. You can make slightly better headsets today, particularly if money is no object - but the core limitations are really the human factors, and the timing constraints necessary to accommodate human senses and rate of motion.