This is why I'm high on the metaverse long term. In ten years, there will be a $500 (or whatever the 2033 inflation adjusted value is) VR headset that blows the Apple Vision Pro out of the water in terms of optics, will run a highly optimized version of the lastest revision of Llama locally (and it will be much better than anything we currently have today), come with wifi 8 (so it will have multigigabit per second real word performance), capable of rendering graphics that look much more realistic than Unreal Engine 5 (with high frame rates due to AI upscaling and frame generation).
There will be people that will spend almost every waking hour with one of those things attached to their face if they can also make this device lightweight and comfortable
In 2040 we will have lenses with 32k displays and gpus with 10 trillion transistors and 1 petabyte of memory. Its hard to predict what you can do with that. The real world would be empty by then.
Maybe for some. But for those living in unfortunate circumstances (low socioeconomic status, small apartment, poor future prospects, etc) I bet a VR world of paradise and social connection is far more inviting.
There will be people that will spend almost every waking hour with one of those things attached to their face if they can also make this device lightweight and comfortable