I wonder if it would be possible to detect from user eyes where he is focusing and adjust the focus point accordingly. Would you think that would add another level of immersion?
From what I've heard from the Oculus folks, it won't happen any time soon. Your eyes move way too fast for a VR system to react to them.
It will happen eventually, but it seems like we need cameras/computer vision systems/drawing pipelines with an order of magnitude lower latency for that to actually work.
It's pretty close to happening; they can already track your eyes fast enough to render at higher resolution at the fovea area as your eyes move around:
Also, your eyes are very slow to focus relative to your eye movements, so it is probably doable now. It still will not feel like real life, just sort of eye tracked depth-of-field. Your eyes will still be focused at infinity, but near things will blur when you look in the distance, and vice versa.
That would be an interesting research project. Track eye movement and focus. I could see how it would greatly enhancement the experience as well as introduce some fun & new rendering performance problems needing to solve.
One alternate possibility is to use a lightfield display. The problem with these is they are currently extremely low resolution and require consistent rendering at all focal lengths.
It will happen eventually, but it seems like we need cameras/computer vision systems/drawing pipelines with an order of magnitude lower latency for that to actually work.