“If I have my head in a box, I don’t want any video stuttering, especially if I’m crossing the street,” Nguyen says. Something goes wrong, you’re left in the dark. 

Something we haven’t touched on yet is the pure goofiness factor of VR. The headsets just don’t look cool. One of Apple’s promotional videos showed somebody wearing a Vision Pro headset on an airplane ride, though the most unrealistic part about that fantasy was that none of the passengers on the plane were staring at her weird, goggle-clad face. Gebbie, who recently took a trip by plane, says the devices just aren’t unobtrusive enough to become a regular thing people wear.

“I could’ve brought a headset and sat on the plane and watched Netflix on a huge virtual screen,” he says. “I didn’t, because that would be extremely embarrassing.”

VR headsets will likely become slimmer, less cumbersome, and easier to wear over the next few years, and by then, brandishing one in public may not feel as odd. But there’s yet another problem they’ll still have to overcome: the sense of isolation that comes from immersive experiences.

Apple’s video pitching the Vision Pro as an entertainment device showed people strapping the device to their heads, battery packs stuffed in their pockets, then kicking back on their couches to watch some movies on their own personal gigantic screens. Alone.

Apple is also positioning its headset as a social device, one that allows enhanced FaceTime features on calls with friends. But every social feature Apple showed was being demonstrated by people alone in their homes connecting with someone far away. The Vision Pro—at least the version we saw during the WWDC keynote—has no real way to share the experience with someone near you or in your own home. If you want to interact with the other humans in your vicinity, you can do so by showing them a creepy, AR-tinted image of your eyes peering out from behind the Vision Pro’s glass front.

Disney+ will be available on the device, so you can use it to watch kids’ movies. But you’d think people would want to watch Disney movies with their actual kids, not alone in their own AR headspace while staring sadly at a movie projected over the video pass-through of their kitchen counter.

Besides, long-form video is just awkward in VR, says Nguyen. “Head-in-a-box is a snacking exercise,” he says. The ideal use time is ”a little bit here, a little bit there”—not hours on end.

Realistically, as long as VR or AR headsets are such solitary, uncomfortable experiences, people just aren’t going to want to wear these devices for long.