If the problem was really just the quality of headsets, you'd expect some dose-response relationship, I think. Headsets may not be good enough, but they're much better than they used to be, so you'd expect SOME stable growth in using it for shared environments Second Life style.

But that hasn't happened. I'm thinking the problem isn't lack of good VR, it's that a truly shared metaverse isn't really something we want.

We want our own spaces. We want to have the option to just "watch", to be invisible to the world we're exploring (or to lurk, in forum/chat terms).

When even better VR comes, I think it will be used for far more solitary activities than social ones. We do see some hints of a dose-response relationship there, with reasonably popular VR games like Half Life Alyx.