i've been pissing about a bit in VR and it's true, it all looks bright and cartoon like right now. either that or "photo realistic" ie 360 photos.
was speaking to a friends who has designed a VR experience and he said it's cos the computing power, the drawing, the live rendering, it's still really hard. so you have the odd standout like alyx: second life, but everything else has to infantilise or simplify.
some other things that are maybe a bit interesting about VR:
1. it's already colonised / corporatised. this oculus quest 2 headset i've got at the moment is, i think, market leader and the brand, oculus, is actually owned by facebook. get that. you literally cannot do anything with it unless you join facebook. which is crazy to me. i deleted my fb account years ago and had to rejoin, just to use this fucker. how mad is that?
2. in order to get started in any VR experience with this type of headset, you need to create what's called a "guardian boundary" which is like a 2m x 2m space, or as close to that as you can get. you put one of the controllers on the ground, so it knows where the ground is, then you point one of the others and literally draw a circle round you, which is the clear floor, no obstacles.
and the idea is that this is your physical limit for your "6DoF" ie "six degrees of freedom" - so you can walk around this area, look up and down, turn around. and if you get near the "wall" of it, you breach back into actual reality, like a sort of weird watery glossy version of it, but it's like a safety feature, so you don't fall over and stuff. but it's weird, that moment of the breach, when i first put the headset on, i kept playing with that breach, cos the transformation between the different realities can be quite interesting.
3. i've been messing with this app called "multibrush" which is like any drawing app, similar look to ipad, but you can draw in 3D. like do a drawing, then magnify up and out, walk around it, draw on the other side. so more like sculpture. and you can make rooms and have other people in there with you, draw on each other's stuff.
4. you can take photos and videos but they look shit - all of a sudden, screenshotting is pointless and useless. the immersive experience requires the headset and full attention.