I want private metaverses which are community funded and don't rely on the surveillance apparatus of Meta. The Internet already has metaverses, the only difference is they're not experienced with VR headsets. There are many self-funded communities that rely on donations to sustain themselves and earn the creators and admins a living so they can dedicate all their time to their community.
The problem with Meta is that you're in their own surveillance ecosystem and can't opt out unless you have serious mullah to branch off to your own private metaverse. But I believe this can be achieved with open source codebases powered by donations that can power these private metaverses and onboarding donators who are not relying on Meta's billions.
My theory is that the failure of VR for business is going to be that it is bringing synchronous work back to a workforce that has mostly realized that it wants to work asynchronously. That is, it's trying to recreate being in an office, which is precisely what a lot of people don't want right now.
There may be some cases it's useful for, but it's not going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars of profit without being widely adopted for general purpose "metaverse" usage.
Meta's reputation is negative and I think most people want to see it fail. Zuckerberg (and Thiel) is just too evil. So I think Meta will have an uphill battle.
A lot of the products that Apple puts out were developed by Microsoft research or even Xerox, but they were ahead of their time. Meta is likely experiencing the pain of being the first to devote resources to an unproven market that will likely be popularized by someone who figures out how to do it better, cheaper, or for a particular niche first.
One compounding VR problem is that of peripherals. One can imagine driving a car, walking "in place", or even piloting a jet fighter... the peripherals and peripheral feedback are probably as important as the goggles themselves to those experiences.
If computer history is any indication, then the first VR company to develop a killer app will win the market. I personally expect apple to release VR next year, and they will probably eat Meta's lunch because apple specializes in luxury products and VR is very much a luxury product right now. One important caveat is that I don't think Apple will launch unless they have a killer app.
Immediate use cases I can think of is gaming, enterprise applications in industries like automotive, aerospace and medicine.
If the price of the headset drops then maybe in the field of remote-collaboration, arts and education.
It won't be a 24/7 usage device. But I still fear that users could get sucked into an environment where they will lose all sense of time and space for a long time and will have lot of physical and mental health issues.
It's difficult to predict the future though.