VR is as useful as the whole movie industry and the game industry. Yes, it is important for entertainment. With all the streaming services the movie industry is moving from central cinemas to your home.

So VR will be in competition with all the other entertainment industries. But is that useful in any sense just besides entertainment? I doubt.

It started all years ago with Google Glass. Even at that time I doubted that there is value in this. Now, we are here and Google Glass is finally dead. I know it is in the rumors that Apple will bring its VR headset soon. But really? Will that make it better? I doubt.

VR will be in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. It is something, you can't just do besides. It will need your full attention. I doubt that there is some real usefulness.

Entertainment is not enough? What's our purpose in life? Work and reproduce?

I have an old farmers house with a land and I have historic cars and I travel the world for real, not virtually, because I want to learn the world for real, not virtually.

My house is near a hughe lake. There are people swimming for real, not virtually; there are people sailing for real, not virtually; there are people windsurfing for real, not virtually.

I think it's important to note that Google Glass was not really a VR system—it was AR, essentially overlaying a HUD on top of reality. I can see many extremely useful possibilities with this that just don't apply to VR (which, indeed, I think is going to be most useful for entertainment and a few other niches).

AR can help with navigation (overlaying the directions right on your field of view); with social interactions (facial recognition, even locally, can identify people already in your contacts, and remind you "you wanted to thank her for that birthday present", or whatever); with learning about the world (look at a tree, a flower, a bird and ask for an identification)...

And that's basically just taking apps that exist now and imagining them integrated into AR glasses.

(Yes, there are definitely concerns about things like privacy, with the possibility of having cameras on our faces all the time; I am hopeful that we will find solutions for these, but don't have good ones off the top of my head.)

In my (admittedly uneducated) view, VR can be useful for some professional tasks in the immediate future. Things like 3D modeling, architecture, explorative data analysis. But Facebook is a social media company. Aside from a small proportion of enthusiastic users, people won't want to socialize with VR. They'd rather check an app on their phone every so often while doing something else. If they want a more personal and engaged conversation, a video chat is better than VR. The Metaverse makes no sense beyond games. And the heyday of socializing in MMOs has long passed (much to my dismay).