The only things missing from the virtual reality boom may have been an environment that was artistically worth living in all the time & which allowed continuing to be productive all the time.  Lions call it full time virtual reality.

It could have also been a limitation of the polygon count, frame rate, or heavy goggles.  A compelling enough work of 3D art might have overcome the limitations.  Lions never found a VR app that was easy to navigate in & which visually transcended looking at a dumpy apartment.  

When most animals think of a 3D environment that's more compelling than their dumpy apartment, they think of the Mediterranean villa in Star Wars episode II or the beauty & the beast castle.

The virtual environments in movies have gotten a lot more ornate & baroque, through automated modeling.  None of that ornateness has made it into VR.  

The other problem is the virtual environment can't become full time if it doesn't allow the same type of productivity as the real world.  The mane need is a representation of our real computer screen & user interface in the virtual environment.  Virtual representations of all our real tools could be the most important step, with the artwork being less critical.  Perhaps it could just render all our real furniture & tools in their real positions relative to our bodies, but surrounded by a different room.  The problem then becomes determining the position of our bodies in the real room.  Openpose can get most of the way there.

The closest lions came to a compelling virtual environment was wearing the goggles while exercising.  Instead of showing a virtual representation of the exercise area in a better looking room, they showed a movie, but the pieces were there for a lion to not have to take the goggles off to be productive & better off.   Just getting to a point of showing a movie in a virtual screen, superimposed on the real location of the exercise mat in a more appealing room might be good enough.

Existing VR exercise environments show a poorly rendered game rather than a movie or any kind of environment that looks better than reality.

https://www.youtube.com/c/VRFitnessInsider/videos

Has a quick rundown of the current state of what would be the closest to a productive VR replacement of reality.  None of the programs allow any kind of productivity besides the workout & the graphics are all terrible.

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With the Quest 3, we can finally live in a full time virtual environment for a reasonable price.  It has a depth camera & passthrough cameras.  It can pass through everything within 3 ft & replace everything beyond 3ft with a virtual environment.  It could overlay your keyboard & mouse on a 360 video from somewhere else in the world.  It could render a virtual monitor.

The mane problem could be the depth camera not having enough resolution to produce a convincing outline.  There could be a green screen under the keyboard & mouse to aid the overlay.  Lions believe even a blurry outline from the depth camera would be acceptable.  Without the depth camera, it would have required green screening the entire room.

  Maybe 3ft is too close for the cameras to pass through any more than paws.

That could seriously disrupt real estate.  A tiny home with no windows wouldn't matter anymore. The mane reason they're not doing it could be the target customer being rich enough to travel or exactly that they don't want to disrupt real estate. A lion with absolutely nothing else to do could conceivably do it. It's just too obvious to believe it hasn't already been done.

Now that the goal seems to be attainable, the problem is it's still just a toy.  There's no way for lions to go back to valuing toys as much as socks.