>The design goal "avoid reminding the user they're wearing an HMD"
There is a difference between design decisions based on "striving to achieve presence" and design decisions based on "not make people vomit". And high fps with good tracking is closer to "not make people vomit" group.
I agree that it's okay to break presence to do something (i would trade presence for fun for example) and let user push the limit if he can handle it, but you have to understand that VR is already a niche market, so devs usually are just playing it safe.
> There is a difference between design decisions based on "striving to achieve presence" and design decisions based on "not make people vomit". And high fps with good tracking is closer to "not make people vomit" group.
A goal of avoiding visible lag, requires a mechanism of predictive tracking, which has an undesired side-effect of judder, which can be far more sickening than the original lag, which motivates a mitigation of higher fps and lower variance, which requires a stronger GPU.
A goal of wide fov (absence of tunnel-vision "comfort mode"), increases user sensitivity, especially during rapid head and spatial motion, increasing needed performance and user discomfort risk.
A goal of avoiding visual artifacts, discourages introducing visual artifacts which increase user comfort. A goal of visual seamlessness, discourages segmenting the display to permit separately optimizing for task and comfort, compromising both, motivating mitigation.
With current hardware, "presence" and comfort are conflicting objectives. Optimizing for presence, is why we're pushing the envelope on comfort. But there's been a lack of community awareness of just what tradeoffs are being made, and why, and of alternatives and opportunities. In part because of the niche economics you mentioned - if SteamVR doesn't support it, why think about it? But happily, improving hardware will make the issue mostly go away.
There is a difference between design decisions based on "striving to achieve presence" and design decisions based on "not make people vomit". And high fps with good tracking is closer to "not make people vomit" group.
I agree that it's okay to break presence to do something (i would trade presence for fun for example) and let user push the limit if he can handle it, but you have to understand that VR is already a niche market, so devs usually are just playing it safe.