>>11165VR will have many niche applications like relaxing environment simulator for hospital patients, Submarine crews, long-haul travel, and maybe even as pacification for refugee camp situations.
VR-entertainment could have already been a small commercial success, if it was offered as an arcade-service.
Imagine arcade-machines that are composed of a powerful computer, vr-goggles and various mechanical force feed-back-simulation-harnesses. People could rent time on a VRcade-machine. Valve's VR with an enthusiast set-up comes closest to this currently.
I had hoped for VR tourism.
For the general public a VR set up has to be self-contained in the goggles, with several hours of battery run time.
The only way to make this happen with appealing optical quality in a compact and energy efficient enough way is to make dedicated asic chips for each entertainment experience. Which basically means going back to physical cartridges.
If one were to build an opensource ASIC-chip ecosystem with a complementary development stack it might be economically viable.
Since more of the logic is expressed in hardware, it is much faster and energy efficient, however the ability to patch bugs after release is also much more limited, and the biggest hurdle for this is probably going to be achieving the necessary quality control.
Facebook is a dying empire, and Metaverse is Zuck's attempt to keep it going. It's mostly just a second life remake, but it's probably worse because all the digital-real estate pay to play shit will kill any escapism potential this might have had. For some reason the metaverse graphics look worse than what second life had over a decade ago. Also are you willing to trust Facebook with all your senses ?
I don't think that VR or 3d entertainment will really die, eventually somebody will find a way to make it work.
Maybe when optical interconnects for data-lines on circuit-boards go into general production, it might become possible to make a consumer grade general purpose computer have low enough latency to drive vr-goggles.