Unfortunately, the teams at Valve and Oculus seemed unaware that solving the problems you cited would require "re-engineering the human body", and naively set about solving these problems with more conventional engineering methodologies. Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness, taking advantage of the near-zero pixel switching time of OLED displays, as well as accurate, low-latency, 6DOF head tracking.
Current state-of-the-art VR tech is a huge advancement from late 90s VR tech, here's a few examples that run contrary to your curious assertion that the only significant VR tech advance of the last decade was the transition from CRT to LED displays:
-The usual inexorable orders-of-magnitude march toward greater processing power
-Commodification of smartphone hardware, which happens to be ideal for VR
-The ability to correct for distortion and chromatic aberration in software, rather than with bulky and complex optics
-Advancements in "sensor fusion", where multiple, complementary tracking sensor technologies are used in tandem, to compensate for deficiencies in any single tracking tech
-Low persistence technology that eliminates notoriously sim-sickness-inducing pixel smearing
You've clearly done your reading on this, but the VR landscape really has changed more in the last few months than the five years pre-Oculus.
> Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness…
Not true. While Abrash seems to makes this claim several times early in the PDF [1], near the end there's this:
> In addition to the question of how games will interact with input, rules about how players can move around a virtual space without getting motion sick or losing presence have yet to be figured out. We’ve found that traditional FPS movement is far from optimal and tends to cause motion sickness, so VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.
Abrash admits that "traditional FPS movement" still makes people sick despite all the technical improvements touted earlier in the paper. His solution doesn't work for FPSs but instead proposes new types of games instead of the ones that people want to play. Flying fighter jets, the type of simulation that gives simulation sickness its name [2], does not involve the "slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction" that Abrash says is needed to prevent sickness.
Like you I was excited that Valve had solved the simulation sickness problem, but on closer reading found that it's just not true. Many people have the desire to use VR tech in virtual worlds doing things that involve normal-speed head movements without getting sick, but Valve has not solved this problem.
Simulator sickness is different from motion sickness. That is, there may be low simulator sickness, but it turns out that pulling 9G turns or rocket jumping while running backwards at 40MPH, while not a problem on regular computer screens will get most people motion sick in real life, and hence in VR.
From personal experience and in watching a number of people in my office try out the DK1, I can definitely confirm that there are a number of things that are quite different when strapping on the Rift - relative scale of objects becomes much more important, world detail (books in bookshelves etc) takes on a much more interesting quality, and movement speed is definitely something that seems to scale down - feeling comfortable moving at walking/realistic speeds vs getting sick at traditional video game character speeds.
>Unfortunately, the teams at Valve and Oculus seemed unaware that solving the problems you cited would require "re-engineering the human body", and naively set about solving these problems with more conventional engineering methodologies. Miraculously, they've succeeded
Too bad they didn't listen to the status quo and go about re-enginering the human body instead.
Current state-of-the-art VR tech is a huge advancement from late 90s VR tech, here's a few examples that run contrary to your curious assertion that the only significant VR tech advance of the last decade was the transition from CRT to LED displays:
-The usual inexorable orders-of-magnitude march toward greater processing power
-Commodification of smartphone hardware, which happens to be ideal for VR
-The ability to correct for distortion and chromatic aberration in software, rather than with bulky and complex optics
-Advancements in "sensor fusion", where multiple, complementary tracking sensor technologies are used in tandem, to compensate for deficiencies in any single tracking tech
-Low persistence technology that eliminates notoriously sim-sickness-inducing pixel smearing
You've clearly done your reading on this, but the VR landscape really has changed more in the last few months than the five years pre-Oculus.