Hear me out.
The Drift exists as a technologically-only accessed and experienced plane of reality with its own rules and permanence. Drift engines let you physically enter, navigate, and exit.
What if someone created a scaled down drift engine using the same basic premise to partially access the Drift, creating a quasi-real bubble of Drift-like space with its own rules, access requirements, and features.
Why:
* Why bother programming virtual realities to sit on expensive servers when you can create ones with internally consistent and permanent rules and spaces via things like demiplanes?
* Creating a demiplane or jumping planes is difficult and expensive. It also requires magic. Borrowing the narrative conceit of the Drift as a relatively easily accessible planar technology might be easier to swallow.
* Virtual Reality is way cooler if you can actually enter it, and not even require magic to do so.
* I like the idea of being able to program realities, like Drift technology is borrowing the source code of the universe.
* Since a mini-drift-engine-for-VR is not for transporting whole ships, and doesn't travel the cosmos, it could be a small-sized or low cost device, like a VR headset or a personal transporter pad.
* You can easily tell stories where the party fully enters a VR space with all of their gear and abilities.
* You can introduce levels of depth: some spaces could be accessed through brain-computer interfaces and you don't fully enter, some could have rules that prohibit harm, some could be like 2b2t minecraft anarchy servers.
* It's a natural area to explore the "civilization uploads themselves to a simulated utopia" trope.
* Both the universe and the Drift are infinite and coterminous so this could work for a pretty ubiquitous version of AR as well.
* Technomancers having a fundamental connection to both the Drift and VR is SUPER satisfying.
Also the story of MiSide taking place in a quasi-real techno plane feels right.
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Sf1e had some fun virtual reality scenarios, one of my characters even got a "Never give up on hope" tattoo after playing Starfinder Society Scenario #4-13: Hard Reset. The scale of Hard Reset was encounters in virtual rooms.
From what I remember from playing in it, we just used normal rules for combat and skill checks once we got in, and we had all of our gear and abilities.
With something like virtual reality, there's certainly room for different flavors of it. I do like the idea of civilization living in virtual reality.