I agree with you. I too have a little background in virtual reality, though nothing like yours, I was a late starter, only getting invovled after a long time using industrial 3D environments for modelling and simulation, in my work as a systems Engineer. I didn't even get into Second Life until around 2014 :)
But since then, around 2017 I started PhD candidate work with a project named "The possibilities of first person view interactions between the users of unmanned aerial vehicles, and the users of virtual worlds". I think you can probably see what the aim was. I think it has largely been achieved, and now seems to be in use in applications like remote landers on other planets, for example. The aim of my work moved on, when it became apparent that a fundamental limitation exists, not only affecting virtual world technology, preventing technology like above becoming something we will see in public virtual worlds, but actually affecting the real world, and which is actually existential, if it is not fixed.
That is the energy handling of humanity.
We take all our energy from our planet, and this is physically unsustainable, but we are tied into a mindset which has difficulty seeing it, due to the way money works. As a direct consequence, we structure the energy handling of virtual worlds in the same way as we do the real world, and they are all failing, becoming tehcnically bankrupt within only a few years for exactly the same reason, it is physically unsustainable.
The truth is that a virtual world is just a simulation of the real world, with some virtual enhancements.
As such it is a model of the real world, as surely as any engineering model applies to a product under design, it is a kind of prototype, capable of demonestraing the world we would wish to have, as well as worlds which don't work, like the current one.
Not many seem to be ready to admit the latter, the fact that if it can't work in a virtual world, it certainly can't work in the real world.
To me, you are right, but it has a definite condition, the power for the platform has to come from solar, and further, the income of the platform owners has to come from the solar product, not somehting extracted from users (Who each obtain their energy from our planet by the profit driven extracted energy business), but the opposite, the platform owners must distribute a share of the wealth generated by the solar product powering the platform, to all of the users, who in general will not be solar powered, this then supplying them with a generous UBI.
That would push the Metcalfe utiliity factor for the platform way beyond unity, it seems to me, the first platform offering users a usable UBI will wipe the floor with all competition, but this would not be a bad thing, because a single system solution is needed, we will never have real compatibility of a common virtual world with it being offered in pieces by multiple different manufacturers, with multiple different equipment offerings, all designed to work with their own proprietary virtual world protocols.
I've put this to some famous names in the industry several times now, but I never get comment from them, no-one seems to want to commit to any discussion about it.
In any case, I find myself working self funded now, working to do what I see is necessary to analyse the real world system, identifying where and how we need to work with nature to fix that, in order to finally remove our dependence on extracted energy / profit, so as to enable a future real world environment, in which we might finally see a real viable virtual world, enabling all the superhuman use cases we know exist in the scenario of fully enabled XR.
Meantime, the only development of Apple, or any other big player that would impress me, is them announcing they are going non-profit, publicly owned, and that they are, or are going wholly solar powered.
That is the only way I think anyone will ever achieve a truly full solution.
