[hex4def6]

In VR, it's well known that your peripheral vision is a cue to your brain to infer motion direction.

You can give yourself serious motion sickness in VR if you grab hold of the VR camera and force a roll / pitch in this state.

One of the things some games do is during motion create "tunnel vision" when you move, shrinking down the size of the video feed and putting a black border around it. This significantly reduces this unpleasant effect. I assume the high resolution portion of your eyeball isn't used for motion inference, which makes sense.

I'm thinking this feature is exploiting this same peripheral vision cue.

[Kyselica]

The peripheral receptive fields in the eyes are much bigger than the ones in the center of vision. The smaller center fields are better for detail due to their resolution, while the off center fields are indeed tuned for motion.

Using tunnel vision to blunt motion detection is a clever way to reduce VR motion sickness. It never clicked for me why VR games did that until you brought it up