30-40 years ago UI were quite terrible.
Its natural that we are trying to implement analogous 2D interfaces in 3D as we were train to use those hyper optimised approaches.
What is clear to me is that the VR is new medium for new content. Trying to ram 2D mediums into it and expect it being better is not a way to go.
I have to disagree, most 3D models can be used in VR. There are millions of assets out there that have been produced for the games industry. Both Unity and Unreal Engine have huge communities with lots of tutorials both official and independent on VR development. OpenXR is an open standard supported by many of the big players.
> The only people that bother with going through the trouble for this so far are game studios.
This is wrong, there are plenty of indie studios and individuals building VR experiences. It's actually the other way around, the big studios want to make games that essentially just have VR bolted on whereas the independents are the ones experimenting with the medium.
> 3D movies
I don't see how 3D movies would be compelling in VR. They are still fixed POV so you'd have to watch them on a screen like any other movie. You wouldn't want to have it replace the feed going to your headset since you'd have to keep your head still or risk disorientation and motion sickness. Netflix and Prime are on Oculus btw.
> IMHO, any content that works in VR should be trivially accessible using a normal 2D screen as well.
I'm sorry but that's not feasible unless you use VR controllers with the display set to your monitor. Even then having to control the look direction with a joystick would be terrible compared to just moving naturally and you'd be lacking the ability to dodge, duck, aim, etc. Sure you could make those actions trigger from button presses but then you've just got a bog standard FPS which is not a good VR experience. VR is a new medium, saying that all VR content should be accessible via 2D is like saying all movies should just be filmed stage productions. It doesn't work. Great VR games make use of the full 6DOF, they have you physically push buttons, throw switches, dodge bullets and swords, punch your enemies, walk across narrow ledges. Having these be real physical movements is a radical difference from tapping buttons on a keyboard or controller. It'll only get better as things like full body tracking and haptics improve and come down in price to the point that they are part of the purchase of a headset.
> there's nothing stopping us from building a metaverse right now
Also disagree, I've played Second Life and other 3D chat programs and they can't hold a candle to VR Chat (and VR Chat is put together with bailing twine and bubblegum so I'm not a big fan of it). Presence is a real thing in VR. Our brains really are that dumb (or that adaptive) where chunky polygons presented stereoscopically with a few other tricks really does make you feel like you're in a room with other people. It's weird but also fun. The VR goggles are necessary for any version of the metaverse to get off the ground.
I don't think that our current media will go away any time soon but I do think that VR is here to stay. 10 years down the road I think most households will have more than 1 VR headset. I think it will probably compliment our current UIs, you can put 2D UIs in VR after all and probably make better use of them by having them laid out in virtual space the same way you arrange things in a physical office. Speaking of offices, I'm pretty sure VR will be the default for work from home folks, at the very least for meetings if not for the whole work day. VR is just better than video calls for talking to people and as time goes on we will have a lot more social VR experiences and there will be a lot of people that exclusively socialize in VR.
Creating content for these empty rooms is actually a problem as there are no open standards, the tools are complicated, there are lots of hurdles, and a lot of gate keepers with dollar signs in their eyes trying to tap into any value you might create that are actively frustrating each other's attempts to do so. You end up with these exclusives for some proprietary hardware. And that hardware changes all the time so it is time limited as well.
The only people that bother with going through the trouble for this so far are game studios.
Even 3D movies are largely not accessible via VR because that's a different proprietary content silo with misaligned financial incentives. So, even though there is a lot of 3D content in the form of a decade plus of 3D action movies that were released by movie studios, exactly none of that can be enjoyed via VR goggles. That's how hard it is to target these things. I guess movie studios could do it but then they'd be haggling with the likes of Steam about just how large of a cut they would take. Likewise, Netflix is not a Steam VR experience. They are not producing material in 3D and you can't sign up for a 3D Amazon Prime either. If there were open standards, this would be a no-brainer thing for them but there aren't.
IMHO, any content that works in VR should be trivially accessible using a normal 2D screen as well. There is no technical need for any content to be exclusive to VR/AR goggles and if you are the owner of that content, you'd actually want to maximize your audience rather than artificially limit it. You lose a bit of immersiveness but we've been playing 3D FPS games on 2D screens for decades so that does not seem to be that big of a deal. In other words, there's nothing stopping us from building a metaverse right now. You'd buy the VR goggles to enhance the experience in the same way you might invest in a bigger TV or better sound system.
So, why don't we? Well very simply put, it doesn't solve a problem we actually have. We can already immerse ourselves in game worlds (with or without goggles) and we can already communicate with people. And more importantly, 2D UIs are actually pretty nice for a lot of things; especially when it involves text. And in so far some things might actually work, excluding most of the planet that does not own any goggles yet is not a great plan for creating a mass market.