It's significantly closer to mainstream since the quest 2 than before. I never saw a VR headset on retail shelves before, and I never heard kids talking about it at all. Now both of those things happen to me occasionally.
I mean, I remember when Wolf3D was first released. Some aspects of it - the low-resolution bitmapped NPCs, for instance - were clearly stopgaps. But the over experience was so amazing you were prepared to ignore that.
With virtual reality, the argument seems to be “if we just polish it a bit more it’ll be a compelling consumer product”. How many more years of polishing is it going to take?
I still struggle to see a future where VR/AR headsets don’t have 50m users by the end of the decade. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Quest3 be a sleeper success once the wave of interest generated by Quest2 materializes in the form of new software.
In a lot of VR games you move your character around while you do not and that is what causes a lot of nausea. If games have to be like beat saber for VR/AR to be successful that’s damning.