My question at the end was more of a question to think about, can it become a hype again? What will be needed? Will another domain help out? Another Industry (e.g. Gaming and the Novint Falcon?). Similar as what Doug Bowman asked the community to do in his keynote at Intuition.
"Jaron Lanier coined the term Virtual Reality in 1987. In the 1990s, the media latched on to the concept of virtual reality and ran with it. The resulting hype gave many people an unrealistic expectation of what virtual reality technologies could do. As the public realized that virtual reality was not yet as sophisticated as they had been lead to believe, interest waned. The term virtual reality began to fade away with the public's expectations. Today, VE developers try not to exaggerate the capabilities or applications of VE systems, and they also tend to avoid the term virtual reality."
This is something our lab is doing actively. We use the term VE :). It is interesting to know the history..