VR has not gone mainstream, and every year there is a new explanation for why. The resolution is not there yet. The content is not there yet. The price is too high. The motion sickness is unsolved. All of them are partly true, and none of them is the real problem, because people forgive bad specs all the time when a device fits into their life. VR does not fit.
The device limit is real
Most people carry a phone. They own a television or a computer, and often both. They may own a game console. Now they are adding a watch or some other wearable. That is about four devices, and four is close to the limit of what a person will accept. Every device asks for something: a charger, a place, a moment of attention, a reason to exist.
Notice what those four have in common. They talk to each other, or at least they stay out of each other's way. A call comes in on your phone, you answer it, and the television keeps playing, the console stays paused, the watch vibrates. Nothing forces you to stop what you are doing.
VR is the first device that asks you to leave the others behind. You put on the headset and you are gone from the phone, the screen, the room. That is not a feature. That is a tax, and it is a tax most people will not pay more than once.
It does not play well with others
Here is the thing nobody says in the keynote. When you are in VR and your phone rings, you have to take the headset off. Not because receiving the call is technically impossible. The headset already has speakers and a microphone. It is a phone that cannot take a call, because nobody wired the two devices together.
That single moment is the whole problem in miniature. VR does not connect to the devices people already use. It competes with them, asks for your whole attention, and the moment the outside world knocks it loses, every time. The phone always wins, because the phone is the hub and the headset is an island.
Fix the size by splitting it
The headset is also too big. That part is obvious and has been obvious for a decade. But the interesting fix is not just making the parts smaller. It is splitting the device in two.
A desktop computer solved this years ago. The heavy, hot, expensive part sits in a tower under the desk. The part you look at and touch is light and cheap, and a wire or a signal connects the two. Meta is starting to do the same thing for VR, detaching the processing from the display. That is the right direction, and it is long overdue.
The next obvious step is to make that connection wireless. Put the VR processing unit on a desk, a small box doing the heavy work, and wear a pair of glasses that is mostly display, speakers and a microphone. A computer for your face, with the computer part somewhere else. That is the form factor VR has been trying to skip its way toward for years.
Start with the phone call
For the love of God, if something as basic as a phone call comes in, I should not have to take the glasses off. I already have speakers and a mic on my face. Let me at least receive the call inside VR. That is not the dream. It is the entry ticket.
Because here is the principle. A new device earns its place by playing well with the devices that are already there. The phone, the television, the computer and the console did not become the things people own by being islands. They became them by connecting, by accepting that the phone is the center and everything else reaches toward it.
VR does not need to beat the phone. It needs to stop ignoring it.
Answer the call, show the notification, let the real world knock and be answered without taking the headset off. Do that one thing, and VR stops being a place you go to escape your devices and becomes one of them.
Until then, it is a very good demo and a very expensive place to be unreachable.