> where one can see what's in front of them without taking them off

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.

It's called passthrough-AR, it's a feature on some VR devices, current limitations are that its sometimes monoscopic not stereoscopic or has fucky depth perception (and some devices have black and white passthrough), but as technology advances there is no reason all VR devices won't have near full fidelity passthrough. AR and VR devices eventually merge and become one device.

There is "passthrough", where cameras on the Oculus are relayed to the screens within, and it seems to be capable of mixing that with the virtual world too: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/mixed-reality-with-passthr...

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.

Quest has black and white passthrough. Next-gen's model (Project Cambria) has full color pass-through cameras that supposedly feel realistic enough. Current passthrough is good enough that I can walk through my house headset-on.

Someone correct me if I'm misremembering, but with my nephews Quest it shows you your surroundings and has you draw a perimeter to designate a safe play space, and if you step out of it you see your surroundings.

That becomes AR then, I guess?