The Time cover of virtual reality shows Oculus Rift creator floating above a beach. Time Virtual reality is the future. It must be: I read it in Time magazine. And if Sony, Facebook and Google all agree that something’s the next big thing, they’re unlikely to be wrong.

But if that’s the case, why do so few people actually care?

The stats don’t lie: VR is a turn off. You, the typical reader, would rather hear about the latest games, new smartphones, or even miniature spaceship combat than another piece about head-mounted virtual reality, and how it will change the world. There’s one big exception, of course: everyone wants to read about how VR will change the world of porn. Sex sells.

But how can the industry and the public disagree so much? The problem is VR’s not-so-secret weakness: the dork factor.

Don’t get me wrong: Modern virtual reality is good. Very, very good. Even the Oculus DK2, now over a year old, provides an experience which is functionally unmatched by any non-VR platform. Not just in traditional style games such as Eve Valkyrie, where a game of dogfighting spaceships is elevated to something utterly immersive and faintly terrifying; but also in uses that push the boundaries of what could be done beforehand, such as the co-operative bomb-disposal game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

And as the platform matures, some of the downsides of the early generations will disappear. The low resolution of many current headsets, which makes the world feel like you’re viewing it through a screen door, will improve; the headsets themselves will get less bulky, and eventually lose the wires; and even gaming computers themselves will get faster and cheaper.

That last one is more important than it sounds: it goes under-discussed in most VR coverage, but the cost of a gaming PC that can run games for the Oculus Rift at the resolution and frame rate they demand is easily upwards of £1,000. Sony’s forthcoming Morpheus, which hooks up to the PS4, cuts that cost by a third – but the company has not yet made the device widely available to testers, and many are concerned that the Playstation won’t be able to push 120 frames-per-second at a 4K resolution.

These things shall pass. What won’t pass – what is intrinsic to the whole concept of VR – is that you will will still be sitting in your living room with a visor strapped to your head, oblivious to the world around you.

Take the cover of this week’s Time, seen above. Palmer Luckey, the young, successful founder of Oculus, leaps in obvious joy. And yet, the second the cover was released, it became a laughing stock. Because despite the bombastic coverline, despite the technological prowess, despite one of the most iconic magazines in the world endorsing it, the cover image is the dorkiest thing ever printed.

That could be fine! After all, people do lots of things that make them look stupid, like playing Wii Tennis, eating footlong hotdogs, or having sex.

But those things all have something that virtual reality doesn’t: they look fun to do even if you’re not actually involved. Watch someone playing Wii Tennis, and you probably want to have a go; watch someone having sex, and you definitely want to have a go. Watch someone playing on VR, and you’re as likely to come away feeling a bit embarrassed for them.

Mark Zuckerberg playing in virtual reality Facebook

The problem is that, until you’ve used virtual reality, you have to take it on trust that it’s actually any good. Screenshots of VR games don’t show why you would want to play them, pictures of people playing just make you cringe, and so all you have left is faith in the hype. And if there’s one industry where people are rightly suspicious of hype, it’s gaming.

That problem is confounded by the pseudo-VR doing the rounds, in the form of things like Google’s “Cardboard” kits, which let you mount a phone in front of your face and experience a simple virtual world. They mean that for thousands of people, their only experience of VR is profoundly underwhelming.

Try as I might, I can’t think of a single example of a successful consumer technology which has these twin downsides, of being impossible to accurately demonstrate without the physical object present, and of being unappealing to experience second-hand. Retina displays had the former – you really had to use it to experience it – while video gaming itself has the latter (pictures of people playing video games really don’t make you want to play video games).

Something that did have both those flaws is 3D television. A few years back, it was the future of TV, but manufacturers never actually managed to convince anyone that it was worth it. And we all know how that ended.

I could be wrong; it could be that the lure of being transported into virtual worlds is enough that people will splash hundreds of pounds sight unseen, or that the initial models will be so successful amongst early adopters that people will buy them after using a friend’s unit. Or it could be that this wave of VR will be the second big attempt to make the technology happen, and then we’ll have to wait another 20 years for the third.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk