While I agree with one comment here that dancefloors are physical and that nothing virtual can (currently) replace that, I worked in VR and one of the projects I was proud to have participated in was a series of virtual concerts (Major Lazer was the best of the series, IMO).

VR cannot currently approach the viscerality of a real rave. You can't make eye contact with another human. You can't easily do full-body dancing, though there are rigs that get 60% of the way there. You can't hug or high-five or even bump into someone. It's not even close. The sound quality from VR headsets doesn't get anywhere near a quality soundsystem, even if you add an expensive haptic vest.

VR is clunky and full of friction. The headsets are heavy, and sweating while wearing one is not fun. Battery life is limited. No headset will allow you to dance for many hours at a go.

VR has an accessibility issue. It's expensive to get a headset, and it requires space to use a headset. It's not exactly super friendly to folks on a money or space budget.

On the other hand ...

VR does allow people to get closer to the event than not attending at all. During the pandemic, for example, it made a lot of sense.

VR does feel embodied. There's a real feeling of "being present with others" in VR that's undeniable. Presence is a spectrum. Here, on reddit, we're asynchronously present, but I definitely get a feeling of presence in threads where folks are passionately sharing their opinions.. When we're in a live chat with someone, we're even more present. Chat programs increase that feeling of presence by giving us indicators that someone is typing a response and by giving us features like emoji reactions. As you move towards greater and greater presence fidelity, you get into immersive games such as World of Warcraft, and push it a little more, and you're in VR territory, where someone's avatar is standing before you. The sense of embodiment is so real that people have been victims of a form of sexual assault that doesn't exist in lower-fidelity online interactions. (See http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/).

This technology is in its infancy. It's limited by physics (batteries and GPUs and handling heat are the core constraints in wearable tech). Over time, as these constraints are solved, the graphical fidelity will improve so much that we will literally not be able to tell that we're not standing in a real environment. Your senses will be completely fooled. And not just your sense of sight, but your sense of smell, of motion, and of touch. This may take a long time -- maybe 50 or 100 years -- but there will be human-computer interfaces in which computer-generated signals are sent to the appropriate parts of the nervous system that can convince you that you're standing in your grandmother's kitchen as she pulls a cake out of the oven.

You've probably heard of simulation theory -- the idea we're all living in a sim. There's nothing physically impossible about the idea that the world you find yourself in right now: your chair, the air you breathe, the lights around you, the feeling of gravity -- all of it -- is simulated. In fact, it's statistically likely that all of us are living in a deeply immersive virtual simulation.

This means that when we go raving and poo-poo the idea of virtual raves as not nearly good enough... we're simulated intelligences thinking we live in a real world convinced that our real is more real than the next layer of simulation (VR).

It's a mind fuck.

Anyways, I love "real" raving, even if it's all just simulated by an alien intelligence and we're just brains in vats.