Standing in your home office, sweating, with foggy vr glasses, trying not to fall down or run into walls while looking at low-poly NPCs coming at you, trying to use bizarre, disembodied "hands" to keep them away. What's not to love?
I have played VR. Several headsets in different setups. It's fun if you are riding a VR roller coaster or sitting in a boat as a tourist, but the only games I played that were halfway decent were Beat Saber and Alyx. Those games have addressed the controls issue better than the other games I've tried, but the sweating, fogged goggles, and the aching feet definitely still showed up in those games.
If you have not tried something with a cockpit (like Elite: Dangerous), it's worth a shot. I found it very accessible and actually quite fun, even though I hate the game outside of VR.
>> VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
>Is it though?
Yes. The Quest 2 is incredible. No PC required, just a headset and 2 hand controllers. Games give you a completely immersed experience in a synthetic world where you can look around, explore, play, talk to other players in real time.
It is here and I would call it super fun, but not useful (maybe that's what you were questioning). I think it may be a fad like the Nintendo Wii, or it might hang around to varying degrees. Maybe I lack imagination but I don't see people wearing AR glasses in public or to work even if they do become ultra-compact and awesome.
Some people let their excitement lead them to believe "cool fun new thing" is somehow the magical future. I played Dactyl Nightmare (VR) back in the 1990's and have been waiting for awesome home-VR since then and quest is every bit of what I had imagined maybe it could be. But at the end of the day, rec-room paintball is just Dactly or Quake Arena. A 25yr old guy at work had to show me Mario Tennis on his Switch - it's just pong with special moves and fancy graphics. What's new is old, and I don't see any revolution with VR outside of niche applications like training and some visualization. Now get off my lawn while I go play some EchoVR.
I haven't tried the Quest 2 yet, so I don't know how good it is, but to me, it's not "completely immersed" until you can interface directly with my brain to feed it false visual, auditory, smell, touch, etc. signals, as well as interpret signals I make to move around, which causes me to interact with the virtual world instead of the real world.
Anything else to me just feels kinda clunky. Certainly the stuff available now is way better than stuff from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, but it's a far cry from complete immersion.
It sure is clunky yes. It's certainly not totally immersed.
But it's so much more immersive than what we had before that it's still really amazing. If you had skipped computers in the 80s and 90s because they were nowhere like perfect yet, you still works have missed out on an amazing time. The same is happening now.
Is it though?