[potatolicious]

Unfortunately this is the way it will be for the immediate future - the combination of high resolution requirements and high refresh rate requirements means that any VR application will have to render a lot more pixels than "typical" games on phones/PCs.

You can for example get away with rendering at 30Hz for a typical game, but that's a recipe for nausea in VR - where you'd want 90-120Hz instead. That's a lot of extra pixels immediately.

Even something as simple as a virtual desktop is going to be pretty performance intensive if only because of how many pixels your hardware has to push around.

There's not really a good way to make a mass-consumer (i.e., low-end PC, mid-end phone) version of this tech yet, and probably not in the near future either since any hardware gains we make (either in mobile or desktop) will be poured into visual fidelity.