“It’s painful how hell-bent Mark Zuckerberg is on convincing us that VR is a thing.” That’s a TechCrunch headline in an article about this week’s Meta VR developer conference, where the company unveiled a new $1,500 headset for use in the still-very-beta metaverse.

The lonely hellscape of Facebook/Meta VR platform Horizon Worlds, which was profiled in a New York Times article last weekend, hardly sounds like an allure even to VR gaming nerds, and much less for the average users of the Internet and social networks. So, to be sure, the metaverse still seems years away from becoming the parallel reality vision of fun and utility that Zuckerberg outlined when he announced his company’s big pivot to virtual reality last year.

NYT reporter Kashmir Hill tried out Meta’s Quest headphones and spent a total of 24 hours on…