I am convinced people who talk about immersion in VR have never been addicted to any game. It doesn't take that much to lose yourself inside of one. After the first few minutes both VR and non-VR games are the same once you're fluent with the controls.
This couldn't be farther from the truth.
Take a game as simple as Zombie Training Simulator. Holding your hands up and firing virtual guns is a completely different experience than pointing a mouse and clicking. Physically bending over to pick up a grenade, then throwing it, is far more immersive than pressing the number 5 and holding a mouse button down to prime it, then releasing it to throw.
Then there's Ultrawings. Having head tracking, being able to look around by just pivoting your head, makes the flying experience feel so much better, even if the graphics are dated by 10 years in terms of texture and model detail.
When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real.
And I have plenty of gaming experience. I've been gaming since I got an NES for Christmas when I was 5 in 1987.
Not disputing anything you're saying but I actually have this same experience playing games where you can fall and the player accelerates (particularly if the camera is first person or right behind the player). Just looking at the screen when I jump off a cliff in something like WoW makes my stomach feel like 20lbs of iron while I'm falling. I've kinda learned to enjoy it at this point.
In the end, I ended up making a tiny tiny step and leaning forward enough that the game registered me as having jumped. The two experiences aren't even comparable. In one game where I was in a hot air balloon I even freaked out and panickedly searched for the button to exit the game.
What's interesting is that after far too many hours of WoW, that fall distance is so ingrained that I get that feeling at the same point in other games, even if they have a longer 'safe' fall distance.
Or closing their eyes. Something they would do for a movie when there is an uncomfortable segment.
For example, the distinction between being deeply involved and distracted in a game (which does not require special tools) versus the extent to which the game will trigger automatic bodily reactions.
In other words, someone deeply "immersed" in a chess-match isn't quite the same as someone "immersed" in a VRv game so that they fall over at a jump-scare.
FEAR is a game that really underscored this to me - and every game I see it in afterwards just adds evidence for it.
Required? No. But adds to immersion a LOT.
Given that you had to enter pin codes by setting the hand to pointing mode and move around with the mouse, i wonder how it would translate to a VR experience today.
Again proving the point that VR has no actual use case.
So VR is definitely not pointless. Motion tracking for your head/arms/feet unlock many applications that are previously hard or impossible (e.g., 3D sculpting using mouse/tablet vs a motion controller).
But it's not always better than mouse/keyboard input for let's say typing or shooting a target. Having more irrelevant degrees of freedom makes it harder to master your input controllers, even if you already had a lifetime of practice with it in the real world (e.g., I am okay with doing parkour levels of movement with WASD/Space but won't ever try it with my real limbs even though in theory I know how to climb over a real world fence).
I'm not an ayatollah of VR, but without any foundation to support it this is a pedantic and ignorant comment