When projects are in early stage and they don't want to waste sculptors' valuable time, my wife's company will mock stuff up in VR and view models as such.

Yeah that's Hololens' raison d'etre. It's the only reason to bother. it is a heartfelt desire for a volumetric display that has been repeatedly and thoroughly trounced by physics.

It's also the opposite of the operative word of VR: immersive. You don't need an "immersive" car model. Maybe you do if you climb around in it? But we're even more corner-case.

The other reason to bother is okay, you're working on an F-35 but you have no idea how to fix an F-35 so you slap on a hololens and it overlays the wiring schematic on top of the wing so you know what panel to pull off. But the operant concern there is "you have no idea how to fix an F-35" and once you've done that once or twice you prolly don't need the hololens anymore.

I know they talk about surgery practice and the like, but I have no idea if that has progressed at all.

There's a certain tactility to surgery (major or minor) that you're never going to get from AR or VR. This is why we have a long list of biological analogues for vagnias, cervixes, etc. We had our pantheon back when I was doing heart shit. Everybody has something that feels and acts like the thing you're doing surgery on. Whether or not it looks like what you're working on isn't even a consideration. The amount of surgery you can do where you have an unoccluded view of the action is like a dozen ICD10 codes and the force-feedback of "am I poking this needle in right" is still more important.

My friend tried really hard to get me to like a first person shooter game in his Meta goggles, but as someone who doesn't even like regular games to begin with, it was a big shrug from me.

Yeah see there's that "immersive" word again. "Immersive" matters for some things.

We've probably been through fifteen? Twenty? Games with VR. There are three that are worth bothering with:

1) Beat Saber. 'cuz shit flies at you like crazy and you have to wave your arms around like a maniac. It's fuckin' fun.

2) Wipeout. 'cuz shit flies at you like crazy and you have to sit stock fucking still to keep from throwing up. I'm serious. Two-dozen-odd games and none of them have three levels of safeties you have to defeat before you get the real experience.

3) Tripp. Because circular breathing exercises are really entertaining when you're sitting on a fluorescent mushroom.

(3) is kind of an asterisk? Because I mostly use it for contrast neurotherapy with (2). 20 minutes of Wipeout followed by 10 minutes of Tripp is wringing your brain out like a sponge and then soaking it back up again. It's mental zit-popping followed by a warm washcloth. And none of it is "useful."

EA made a big deal about Star Wars: Squadrons. It's shit. It's space bumper cars. Nothing moves fast, there's no real immersion because they're afraid of making you vomit (Wipeout is also afraid to make you vomit, but went "on your own head be it"). Paper Beast is fun but it's fun without VR but that's not an option. Paper Beast is basically Shape of the World, which isn't VR, with added interaction to frustrate you with how shitty controls are in VR. There's others I could mention but it really comes down to "unless you are absolutely pummeling your senses don't bother. And first person shooters will never meet that threshold. Nearly all the action is in the middle distance where our distance cues don't come from binocular vision anyway. There's very little point to looking around like crazy while doing a first person shooter because the whole arrangement of battle is designed to keep your sides safe and free and if they aren't, you're going to change your perspective until it is. Wipeout? You actually have to look around turns and look up through the ceiling to steer.

I think they're a product of circle jerks in tech companies more than a connection to what consumers are clamoring for. Groupthink is a hell of a drug.

I think they're a fundamental misunderstanding of how we perceive the world. I think they're as big a mistake as touch screens. I think if Nintendo can come out with a VR headset in 1995 and have it move things about as much as the Power Glove did, you can evaluate that nerd helmets are about as essential as power gloves.

We could do the shit out of a power glove these days. We don't.