Can you go in to detail on the main differences that showing some virtual avatar of a human travelling around on foot vs sitting in a buggy and travelling around on wheels brings? What extra programming challenges are there that make this unachievable? They have shown they can do it modelling a buggy, to do it as a FPS you just need to alter the control scheme so it doesn't act like you're on wheels and change the character models/scale.
The things you mention there aren't the issue. Currently in Elite, I think most VR players are playing it sitting down and probably with a HOTAS on a desk in front of them. Some may have rudder pedals too. The typical VR FPS games I have seen expect the player to be standing up, and using VR hand controllers. So, Elite would either need to provide a mechanism for transistion the player from sitting in front of a desk to standing some clear area whilst changing controllers and wearing a VR headset. There is also the issue that the headset might not be optimally set up for when the player is seated and standing - my Rift only came with a single room sensor, and I need to adjust it if I change position like that (but something I could fix with an additional sensor, I guess). Or, alternative would be to handle "foot mode" with the player seated, which is also not a great player experience.
The second issue is motion sickness. I can handle flying the ship without issue. I need to be more careful in the SRV. Other VR experience where you can
walk around are already a bit problematic, and running is terrible. Once approach is to have players teleport from location to location - this does seem to avoid the motion sickness issues, but its then problematic to put into a multiplayer games, especially one where many (indeed, most) players arent even using VR.
