Maybe within the tech circles and HN crowd. But outside these circles nobody even feels like something is off.
Reminds me of when no one cared about native mobile (vs the Web), or before that, no one cared about GUIs (command line is where it’s at)
GUIs started to catch on in 1992 with Windows 3.1, and only became ubiquitous when Windows 95 came out. At which point the Mac plummeted to 2% market share, before the iMac started to turn it around in 1998-1999.
The backlash to Steve's announcement of "web apps only" was largely from game developers and early adoption tinkerers. Native mobile was rejected by a majority of developers (who still complain even though we're down to 2 platforms) as an abomination that eschews the open standards of the web and required 3-5x the work to support Android, iOS, Windows Mobile , Nokia Symiban, Blackberry, etc.
Most "native" apps were thin wrappers around HTML5 sites until around 2012-2014. Instagram is arguably what changed this, and why Facebook bought them for $1b in 2012. Users liked the features and responsiveness of native apps. Shortly after, Facebook shipped their native mobile app (written by a 3rd party contractor that knew native mobile - it was an HTML5 wrapper prior to this).
Dozens of essays have been published on HN over the past decade lamenting the death of the Web, PCs, hobbyist PC tinkering, and all that is good, because of the terrible trend driven by native mobile.
So, yes, GUIs and native mobile were exciting from a certain point of view, but they've also had huge (and ultimately ineffective) backlashes that slowed things down a bit.
Saying "nobody cares about VR" feels to me exactly like this. Those that see how important AR/VR will become feel like those that saw the potential of GUIs or native mobile early. Those only seem obvious in retrospect.
In both cases the new UX environment took 5-10 years to catch on. We're now arguably in year 5 of VR/AR (if you assume 2016 era devices were the first viable mass market ones, which also coincides with the release of Pokemon Go as the first mass market AR experience) which is easily as big a shift as it was from keyboard to mouse.
Google in 1998 was just another search engine. Netflix mailed DVDs. Amazon grew from $150 to 600m revenue and had just started selling music and movies.
Facebook non-ad revenue is $3b annually and growing. Oculus store and devices account for easily half or more of that number. Beat Saber on the Quest 2 alone has cracked $100m. Beat Saber!
The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. The switch to Meta fixes this, makes Facebook just one of many properties, with an eye on the prize. It’s like Microsoft pivoting to Azure and away from Windows years before Nadella did.
Valve could step up, or Apple, or Google. But otherwise Facebook is running away with VR, and that will have a massive impact on all of us.