I don't think it's even that. I don't think most people want it.
VR is for gaming. I can see it finding a solid niche there. Make a VR headset that connects to a PC/Mac with extremely low latency and focus all the engineering on the quality of the display and making it lightweight. Gamers will buy it.
AR is IMHO for industrial uses. I could see it being incredibly valuable doing inspections of industrial systems, working in a high-risk environment (for safety awareness), etc. I think the most practical depiction of AR in sci-fi is probably the heads up displays in The Expanse, which make perfect sense to augment human sensory in both military and industrial/maintenance operations in an environment like space.
I actively do not want AR for civilian uses. Yeah, I want to wear glasses and contacts to superimpose ads and slop and Internet drama in front of my life. Get that the hell away from me. When I want to touch grass, I want to touch grass.
A lot of that kind of stuff shows up in cyberpunk, and people forget that most cyberpunk is dystopian. The cyberpunk aesthetic is also kind of 1980s-1990s and is not contemporary. People are stuck in it. We're well past that and even on the tail end of "millennial minimalism" (the Apple aesthetic).
There are certain other things you can imagine VR being useful for like virtual explorations. But monitors actually work pretty well for that and, really, none of that has really developed beyond the gimmick stage. Yes, there are certain types of high-end gaming it works for but that's a niche of a niche that's decreased in size over time. (e.g. flight sims used to be a bigger thing)
We can imagine HUDs of various sorts with AR glasses that are light and non-obtrusive. But largely well into the future. You may have (probably do have) early adopters who can overlook the manifold limitations that exist today but now you have a tiny audience that isn't enough to drive interesting software development.
I suppose with everyone on HUDs the subway train would be full of people catatonic staring straight ahead in their own little worlds, possibly recording everything around them on video.
The Bigscreen Beyond is getting there in terms of form factor, but it achieves that in part by being a dumb headset which relies on a PC and external tracking beacons to work. There's no free lunch unfortunately, putting the brains in the headset itself is always going to add bulk.
A dumb headset is exactly what I'd want. I don't want yet another device with an OS that locks you into someone's f'ing ecosystem or alternately requires me to find apps specifically for it, etc.
That's the form factor I want and that's the reliance on a PC that I want. I want VR glasses that are driven by my setup, not yet another account and yet another app store.
I'd buy that in an instant except last time I checked they thought they'd be scanning my face as part of the purchase.
The Palm Pilot (not the first PDA, but an early decent one) pre-dated the iPhone by about 11 years. By that standard, we're likely on the order of a decade away from an "iPhone moment".
