I’m fully aware the Metaverse isn’t happening.

No one is strapping on a headset to telecommute, and the Quest was never destined to be the next iPhone. It was a fascinating experiment that revealed something fundamental: most people don’t want to live or work in a digital diorama.

A few years ago, VR had all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Money poured in, breathless think pieces declared the dawn of a new digital civilization, and a small army of “visionaries” appeared overnight. They weren’t building a future—they were chasing funding rounds.

The idea that we’d all be buying land in virtual suburbs and decorating our walls with NFTs felt absurd then, and looks even more ridiculous now.

The truth is, that hype suffocated VR. It buried the medium under expectations it was never built to fulfill. But now that the hype has evaporated and the opportunists have migrated to AI, VR can finally breathe again. It can go back to what it was always meant to be: a creative frontier for gaming, exploration, and presence.

VR was never supposed to replace reality—it was supposed to expand imagination. And with the noise gone, it finally has the space to do exactly that.