Yea, but there's no point of having an increased sense of immersion unless there's actually something worth playing with it.
Not being able to sidestep, move forwards and backwards etc, because you don't have any idea of your surroundings goes a long way towards undoing your sense of presence, because the game needs to confine you, or you need to make the conscious effort to confine yourself. By taking away the Move, you've removed your ability to navigate, and have confined your in game character to stationary or on-rails experiences.
You can't even turn around and reach behind you (as in Rez or Panzer Dragoon), because then the camera stops being able to see your hands and arms. So now we're talking about a VR experience where you don't even have 360 degree vision (no analogue stick for rotation). There's just too many limitations in my opinion to make it a good gaming implementation rather than simply a technical showpiece. Kinect is often criticized because the limitations of what you can control with it prevents it having enough software to justify its purchase. From what you're saying here, it sounds like a VR + Kinect would be useful for so few games you could count them on your virtual fingers.
The roadblocks to VR are really separated into three areas:
- The output, the display and 3D audio simulation.
- The main input, how you interact convincingly within a 3D space with hands, and head-tracking.
- The locomotion input, how you move convincingly within the 3D space.
The first one is basically solved at a consumer level, it will improve, but next year Sony, Oculus, and no doubt others, will ship 'presence capable' VR headsets.
The second one is solved at a consumer level, Move, Hydra, Stem, there are very accurate, very nice and reasonably priced 3D controllers, on board motion tracking with camera based positional tracking is good enough.
The third one is a mess. Omnidirectional walking units are stupidly expensive to make to a decent quality, dedicated rooms are not viable, there are legal issues with allowing people to bump around their environments, etc.
However, just because the third thing isn't addressed is not a reason not to attempt the first two. Just the crappy DK1 with an ugly ass slow screen and bad tracking is a very worthwhile experience. Morpheus/CV1 is going to be really incredible. Five years from then, VR will be hugely better still, but locomotion tracking is a much longer term problem.
It's not about if you can design a game that benefits exact digit tracking, it's just if there is a game you want to feel immersed in. As for how many games someone would prefer to play in VR? Personally I think once people try it, there will be overwhelming demand for content, but we'll have to see.
