There is much more - people use it to communicate (VRchat), visit 3D scans of real places (3D Gaussian splatting) or see future concepts, like space colonies or massive starship concepts from their won PoV. Really, a lot of stuff is happening & possible with modern VR. :)
Visiting 3D virtual places sounds cool.
What communities do this? Can I do this on my laptop too to trial it?
I am sure more communities do it, but I mostly know it from VRChat. For some examples I have visited:
Scan of a park in Japan with a steam locomotive on static display: https://vrclist.com/world/1191265
Scan of a park in Japan with blooming Sakura trees: https://vrclist.com/world/1216699
In general, you can see other 3D Gaussian splatting worlds using this tag: https://vrclist.com/?type=search&sort=recent&tags=3DGS
The quality can varies a lot, so I suggest checking for number of favorites & visits to see the best scanned worlds or to go by author once you find the good ones. :)
In general, 3D gaussian splatting is not the only way you can use to reproduce a real world location in VR - you can also just do it manually, modeling the structure & possibly using textures from photos. A good example of such manual reconstruction is Gion Street from Fins: https://vrclist.com/world/859459
As for trying it out - all of the VRchat worlds can be explored in flat screen mode on a PC & VRChat can be installed from Steam or from their website. VRChat is also free, so the only thing needed is to register & it is possible to just use a Steam account as well.
Then just get one of the URLs & there is a launch URL. Alternatively you can search the worlds by name from the VRChat UI. :)