As VR companies get more experience with a front-facing camera, there are many things they can do with it to improve upon it. At it's simplest, a pass through camera is essential to interacting with others without taking off the HUD, whether they be the wife and kids, or a fellow gamer. Next step would be to abstract the visual overlay so that instead of seeing your real hands, you see rendered hands over a rendered panel with buttons such as the pilot's cockpit. The rendered keyboard wouldn't look like a keyboard. Instead, it could have a single big button assigned to a horizontal block of two adjacent keys. Hitting either key would work. And hitting both keys at the same time would be interpreted as a single button press. If the keyboard had IR tracking lights and your hands were wearing very thin IR tracking gloves with no fingertips, then the software could easily track your actual hands and know the exact location of the keyboard without having to crudely show a ghosted image of your hands and keyboard. So, while the front facing camera is not a breakthrough, it enables VR breakthroughs when it is combined with hand and finger tracking, eternal I/O (mouse, keyboard, throttle, flightstick) tracking. For example, if the throttle and flightstick had IR tracking lights to accompany your thin gloves with IR tracking points on them, then you could actually see your real hands as they move the real throttle and flightstick, even if the throttle and flightstick aren't in the exact locations as shown in VR.
