Some people could really enjoy escaping their lived world. Imagine if the costs on VR came down enough so that a person living in a slum in Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro or Chicago could walk through the Taj Mahal, or Petra, or sit in a Harvard University lecture hall? What if they could just make the smell go away for an hour?
It would greatly improve the quality of their life even without solving the much tougher challenge of getting them out of poverty.
Considered expansively enough, virtual reality for all five senses could be a substitute for almost any consumption experience. People could eat protein paste and have it taste like filet mignon. They could walk between the same two rooms in their house but feel like they were in Versailles. VR could massively reduce the global demand for energy and materials.