I feel like an old grumpy man saying this, but I hate the idea of wearing a device on my face to literally hijack one of the precious senses one has. I'm sure over time I'll look back and laugh at myself for thinking that way.
Besides, it's really tiring after just a couple hours, I don't think there's any risk of getting "stuck in VR".
The hijacking of senses was a major concern for the Apple design group at the earliest stages of their headset design.
Reporting from The Information goes into some depth on Apple's headset external screen display (to show the current expression of the wearer) and what sounds like a uniquely high quality pass through of the environment so you can see and interact with people in the room.
It apparently also deals with occlusion problems that are unsolved in the pass-through experiences of in-market headsets.
It sounds all quite magic, and apparently the work is going in to create that sense. TI's reporting says accomplishing these goals is why the device has fallen behind.
Right now I can only tolerate it to enable playing table tennis but it is too uncomfortable for working.
Next Quest might change that.
The direction they are going in the next five years or so is truly comfortable goggles or even normal glasses that do augmented reality with high field of view.
So it will not restrict your vision of the normal world any more than you request.
There are also improvements coming in terms of eye tracking and realistic avatars as well as better room scanning and pose detection. This will mean that quite realistic virtual places start to become comfortable and easy to access.
Try to imagine that instead of going to a physical coffeeshop, workplace or friend's home, you will have the option of just putting on the glasses and get a representation that truly is close to the real thing. Eye contact and facial expression tracking and projection will be a big part of it.
You could even map this virtual coffee shop or what to a specific room in your house, or just one wall.
Or don't have a virtual place at all and just have a giant virtual monitor. Or four of them. Put it on a wall so it does not restrict your view of anything.
The bulky headsets are just a starting point.
I'm already grossed-out enough when I happen to catch a glimpse of myself using a normal computer (faces of people immersed in a computer screen look a bit disturbing, kinda slack and dead, and it's much worse when the face is your own)
I'm with you, it's too weird for now. I'll probably give in when they've got AR/VR combo glasses that you can toggle from one to the other, which I assume is the endgame for all this. By then I'll probably need it to talk to my grandkids or whatever anyway. The march of "progress".
"Grandpa, this is stupid".
Also, there's a lot of innovation happening in display tech for AR too which will be even better, since you'll just see the real world more or less directly.
For quest, you double tap anywhere on the headset (it detects the physical tap) to enable passthrough mode. The game goes away, but you can see. Some games let you see through, but that's limited to games where having something float in front of you in your real room makes sense, rather than being somewhere else.