VR's problem, in my opinion, is that I can get immersed (fully, exactly as the author describes it) in a 2D game just fine - the lack of stereo vision or head-tracking or motion controls is no more an impediment to my immersion than the limited binocular overlap or peripheral vision or lag in a VR headset. And 2D is a heck of a lot cheaper and more convenient (and less nauseating).

That's not to say VR can never be successful, but I think it needs to offer something more compelling than just "immersion." Exercise or AR might be viable routes.

With AI, VR is even more promising. I have been working on a Gaussian splat renderer for the Quest 3, and by having Claude and ChatGPT read state-of-the-art papers, I have been able to build a training and rendering pipeline that is getting >50 fps for large indoor scenes on the Quest 3. I started with an (AI-driven) port of a desktop renderer, which got less than 1 fps, but I've integrated both training and rendering improvements from research and added a bunch of quality and performance improvements and now it's actually usable. Applying research papers to a novel product is something that used to take weeks or months of a person's time and can now be measured in minutes and hours (and tokens).

There are degrees of VR usage I think. I've used it every day for about 5 years now. I use it for sit down flight sims, space games, driving sims often playing with others also in VR. I don't really like it for work compared to a few decent 2D panels in front of me, it's too isolating and I don't need the 3D feeling for that.

The barrier is really the hardware cost so it'll always be a niche hobby in those PC sim areas. I read stuff like 'VR is dead' and know it really means the leaping around Oasis 'Ready Player One' stuff, when really that's just one possible use case. I don't know how it'll ever cross the chasm of being popular, probably when the hardware gets super light and the local computing powerful enough, but there is this VR hobby niche that exists still if it doesn't.

In my experience in the real word, VR is a lot like racing sims. No one I know owns a VR headset, no one I know talks about it, no one I know is very interested in it at all, but both exist as ticketed experience at places in and around malls.

So from where I'm sitting in my middle class suburbs, it's certainly not dead, but it's basically the modern equivalent of those actuated flight sim entertainment experiences from the 80s/90s.

VR seems to be much bigger among the perpetually online. For us normies VR is hardly a blip on the radar.

I still don't even really understand what Horizon Worlds or the Metaverse even was, or if there's a distinction between the two. I've heard of VRChat, but from the little I've seen, it seems extremely unappealing.

I still think that most people don't want to strap a computer screen to their face, for any reason. I've done it, it's not very pleasant.

„Clearly, VR technology isn’t fully ready yet.“

Disagree. It‘s quite mature and usable.

I worked on a software that offered VR as a feature. The user‘s started enthusiastically with eg. dedicated VR rooms. But it became clear that the immersive delta to a screen is surprisingly low. We‘re all trained to immerse into 2D screens on a daily basis. If you then observe how people are ridiculed while wearing a VR headset by their colleagues or how people with complicated hair style hesitate wearing a headset: then you understand why it‘s just not a good fit for B2B.

I’m on my third quest unit (my quest 1 died during the pandemic and I had to buy a new 1, and then the 2 came out). I still use it for around 3-4 hours a week and I’m thinking about upgrading to the quest 3. Just use one or two apps though (beat saber and fitxr), I never really got into actual gaming or social stuff on it. I wish a company would come around and seethe potential for fitness tech with VR, they could come up with better optimized solutions for it (and I don’t really count the mirror or stationary bike stuff). Fitness really fees like the killer app.

VR has never been alive for me. If Apple can't get fetch to happen I don't know how anybody can with the current state of the pc hardware industry.

(1) Something that would be a wild success to any other company would be a failure for Facebook, Facebook just isn't the right company for this opportunity.

(2) I think the Horizon Worlds problem is not so much that the whole idea is cringe but rather than the authoring tools weren't good enough for users or brands to create interesting worlds. I wanted it to work but I couldn't find worlds I wanted to visit and was strongly alienated by the platform's inability to incorporate JPG images or GLB models. No way I'm going to waste my time learning an awkward interface to make worlds based on dumbed-down computational solid geometry where I can't apply those skills to other platforms.

(3) Part of that problem is that the MQ3 has enough RAM that you can use video game programming techniques to make interesting worlds but very little headroom for user-generated content in systems like Horizon Worlds and VRChat. The 16GB Apple Vision Pro is better but I find it completely comfortable to author for PC VR with a 64GB workstation as much as I love the standalone MQ3 experience.

VR is gonna be insane once hardware catches up. It’s the natural next frontier imo.