In our contemporary media culture, it seems difficult to disconnect from immersion. The concept features prominently in much of the marketing for new audiovisual tech, from earbuds to video game controllers and 4K projectors. Exhibition spaces, design studios, and event production firms frontload it in their branding strategies. Immersion sells, in theory. 2016 was widely presented as “The Year of Virtual Reality” in the trade press, fuelled by the techno-optimism of major industrial players finally jumping headfirst into the VR adventure, hoping to make their new headsets the most desirable option for moviegoers, video game players, and office procrastinators. But these audiences didn't embrace innovation as expected. Then 2017 became the year of VR… and then 2018. In 2019, Leighton Evans published “The Re-Emergence of Virtual Reality,” highlighting that the medium is still breaking through, facing barriers to mass consumer adoption. Writing about the latest augmented reality headsets released by Apple in 2024, Wagner James Au amplifies Avi Bar-Zeev's challenge to tech companies, inviting them to discuss publicly how many people are nauseated by these new technologies, a percentage estimated to be rather high.

To this day, VR's coming of age is still not exactly what the venture capitalists hoped for. The Void, a novel mixed-reality attraction using VR headsets and haptic feedback to augment its generic walls, fans, and heat lamps with the wonders of major blockbuster franchises from Disney, was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic; all venues were closed by 2020. On the domestic front, the pandemic created an incentive for everyone to upgrade their access point to the metaverse(s). Yet again, the big breakthrough didn't occur as expected. In an article published in The Guardian on May 13, 2023, John Naughton comically underscores these shattered ambitions with a solemn tone: “A moment's silence, please, for the death of Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse.” Yet with so much money invested, permadeath is often unacceptable for these players, who frequently hint that a comeback might be lurking around the corner.