For what it's worth, I don't believe I see anything of the sort here; How ever far the skybox appears to be to me, it's certainly not in
front of the mountains it crowns, here where I am landed. I know from occasional experience with injection drivers that it would most certainly cause me severe eyestrain if it did.
Things outside the cockpit always look small and close, to me, mind, with stars and planets seeming like beachballs, and the station mailslot looking like I couldn't possibly fit through it, even with a sidewinder, unless there is another ship passing through it at the moment (EDIT: ...offering a size reference) -- I could swear my feet dig through the landing pad, every time I dive down to land.
Maybe this
is due to ED rendering stuff wrong, but there is inevitably the matter of stereopsis only working on a rather close range; Already seated as little as 6m up, and hoisting something down (IRL), I can't reliably tell the distance between the ground and the object on the hook, and keep having to reel out rope long after I think I should be done. Here other depth cues become important, such as accomodation (eye focus), motion parallax, perspective, known size objects for reference and the density and sharpness of detail on things, motion speed, atmospheric occlusion and dispersion, etc, etc, and many of these do not apply in a helpful manner in airless space, with superluminal travel. :7
(EDIT: You may want to try an experience called "Titans of Space", if you haven't already; It gives you a sightseeing tour of our local planets and moons, deliberatly rendered at a 1:1000000 scale, because sizing them down to within where we have steropsis going, gives a sense of scale that you just can't get with their enormous real sizes.)
I suggested doing some supersamling, if possible, because at the very least it does help some with the detail density matter, even despite the low resolution current HMDs have. With enough SS, the screen door effect immediately comes to feel more like actually looking through a screen door, instead of being something that is affixed directly to the image. The stars still look like big painted dots, instead of light points, because that's what they are, but at least they become more stable and don't "shimmer" when looking around. (...and if you, like myself, think the large dots for stars is an ugly art direction decision, know that at one time, before 1.0, the star field was made up of them old four-point flares, that looked equally crayon-drawn.
)
Hopefully generation two or three HMDs will let us focus freely, instead of having the entire image on our retinas in focus simultaneously at all times (maybe using lightfield-, or holographic- or multifocal displays, or maybe something entirely different). For now; Make sure to turn off any depth of field effect; They only serve to produce an interesting, but almost always counterproductive "tilt-shift photography"-like "scale model" effect. Other "cinematic" post effects, such as bloom, film grain, and lens flare, also tend to plaster themselves to your face, ruining immersion. :7
