Good passthrough is very much not indistinguishable from reality.
You tried a VisionPro or Varjo XR3? Since that’s the only ones that have good passthrough. All I have here is a Lenovo Mirage Solo, which while still lowres and black&white does have proper distortion free 3D and really good automatic contrast adjust. Even on that old thing I constantly forget that I am in passthrough. Having proper 3D vision and being able to see your hands and legs goes a very long way into fooling your brain that what you are looking at is real. It’s orders of magnitude better than any actual VR game or the nausea inducing pseudo-3D passthrough you get on Pico4.
You’re NEVER going to use a headset instead of a monitor.
I already replaced 95% of my TV usage with VR and spend a ton of computer time in WMR Portal. I’d happily go monitor-less and replace it all with VR if I could get something a little more high resolution, more comfort, with better connectivity (e.g. HDMI input support) and software.
It’s not about the quality of the hardware or missing improvements to the features.
You can’t comfortably read text on current headsets. Hardware has to get a lot better before this use case is even possible.
If I had to guess, they are aware enough of this to charge a ridiculous amount for it
The price is dictated by high resolution MicroOLEDs having terrible yields which drive the price high, along with bleeding edge CPU/GPU. Though even with that, it’s not really expensive compared to the competition, Varjo XR3 cost $6500 and Hololens2 costs $3500 too. It’s obviously not aimed at the mass market just yet, it’s focused on setting the bar for what a comfortable and versatile VR device has to look like.
That sunk cost fallacy right there is how Meta bled money on this until it was untenable to keep it up.
Meta sucks at building products. They are rich, but incompetent. Every time they accidentally stumble into something good (Quest2 $300 launch price), they ruin it with something else (Facebook account requirement, Metaverse focus, and a $350 price increase), only to than back paddle and end up right were they started. They have been wasting years doing that, killing all the hype and good will they could have had. And even now with the hardware cheap again, the games offering still suck due to wasting so much time on the Metaverse. And lets not even talk about the failure that was QuestPro (“high end” AR/VR headset without a depth sensor and stuck at the same low resolution as a Quest2).
Simply put, Meta has not released a single good or finished VR product so far, neither has anybody else for that matter. Modern VR is basically a slightly easier to use version of what people build 10 years ago by taping Razer Hydras to their DK1s, there has been a serious lack of actual progress in the space, outside of very slow incremental spec increases. VisionPro is the first thing that feels like a true step forward, though some problems remain (battery life, still heavy).