Is there an issue in the tracker for the rotation of a star rays when you move your head? Does this occur on all headsets?
There is actually a case to be made for the starbursts, specifically, among all the things that rotate along with the camera (noteably all manner of cloud-type particle sprites, which
really shouldn't do it), being one of those which are in fact
correct to behave in that manner.
Why? -Because it is not a property of the star, like the star's also (incorrectly) rotating mass ejections are, but a lens flare effect.
The more pertinent question might why there is a lens flare at all - I am a human, not a camera; Although one could probably attribute it to micro-scratches in one's helmet visor. :7
Turn off lens flares, and the questionable rotating starburst goes away, revealing something that looks like a shorter radius version of it, for the star's corona, and
that thankfully does
not clamp z-axis alignment to the game camera. (You may also notice that whenever the disc of the star becomes occluded, e.g. by any struts in your canopy, the lens flare flicks out.)
I’ll have a look for the ice shader - it’s an awesome effect in SkyrimVR with ice cliffs and frozen caves, and I’d love for it to be in Elite too. Job for the next play session
Edit: I’ve been for a gander at some ice boulders and it looks to me like a combo of the ice reflecting “bounced back” light from the planet surface and a stereo mismatch of the ice particle twinkle effect.
The clear ice in SkyrimVR caves is absolutely beatiful; The depth- and refraction effects their shader gives them look very convincing, even in stereo - especially when actually moving around in one's playspace, which gives a sense of room, and of motion contiguity, that "driven" game camera movement kind of destroys.
Your hypotheses about what I perceived as a possible parallax shader for the Odyssey ice boulders could very well be correct; The effect I am telling myself I'm seeing is
extremely diffuse and otherwise indistinct; Although I kind of question the notion of bounce light (EDIT: did I mention I'm a fiend for raytracing? ;P) - I have an exceedingly hard time imagining there being any global illumination, or light probes in our procedurally generated environments, and I play with ambient occlusion off - the shader doesn't work properly in VR anyway (probably because of the asymmetrical camera frusta you get with most VR headsets), making the AO effect look different in each eye. This leaves incidental light sources spawned to simulate ambient light, and the dynamic environment map, but the former should not produce any shapes that "looks like they float within an object", and reflections added to a surface using the latter, should move (kind of) opposite to the way these shapes do, racing across the surface instead of seeming anchored inside.
(Kind of curious, by the way, exactly what sort of trick they use for holographic billboards being reflected in floors and windows... It is not likely the envmap, because they appear plausible geometrically and are not jaggy; and it is probably not a screen-space effect, because they do not actually show the picture that is on the billboard - just a solid rectangle of it's mean colour. -I guess it may be a hand-placed shader+rectangle-object/precedural_geometry component, that comes together with the billboard prefab (just like associated light sources that tints anything nearby with ostensibly the billboard light radiation probably does (not to be confused with the projection lights we see from some other elements in locations), but they could of course all be separate components, which all and each need to be added by hand every time), and "just" effects an additive operation of the rectangle shape on surfaces it is applied to... (EDIT2: You could probably do it by just having the rectangle as a regular object, drawn additively, with just draw-order, or some sort of filtering, deciding what it gets to draw over (EDIT3: ...but then they should definitely have been able to have the actual picture being "reflected" - no screen space limitations)))
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