I
do have a VR headset and play Elite ONLY in VR, starting from the Oculus Rift DK1 (I skipped the DK2).
I do not currently have an
Oculus headset, and Guy Godin turned future Virtual Desktop versions into an Oculus only thing several years back - that's where the money is -- the "classic" version does not receive updates; This why I can not try
it more recent features (EDIT).
The use of curved large UI panels in VR has traditionally been a way to make the most of low HMD resolutions (the ship UI panels was "something" in the DK1, flat or no), by spreading out the periphery over a larger area, where on a flat panel, the farther out you get, the more oblique the angle to it becomes, so that it covers fewer pixels per degree (EDIT3: fewer physical ones on the screen, that is, when looking at the centre of the in-gameworld panel -- the tangential relationship is opposite when it comes to things like how many pixels you need to render per degree of view -- context matters); Argueably it should also give your eyes slightly less worry about accomodation and field curvature, or rather the lack thereof (given the fixed depth of field in almost all VR headsets), since it puts every part of the panel at closer to the same focal distance; In this use case (the need for which has diminished with higher resolution headsets), the distortion is the whole point, and I have yet to see one such that would have preserved geometric verity, had you "naively" slapped a 2D projection of a 3D view onto it.
That said, an image
can of course be
reprojected to any different surface, so that said geometric verity is preserved - so that the chair that stands 45 degrees to your side is still 45 degrees to your side after the curving, and is not stretched or squinched in any way, and from your testimony, it does sound like VD kindly does that: Great! (...on the other hand, if it does not, it wouldn't be the first obvious abberration, which I have encountered others swearing blind they can't see).
I have myself long argued that rendering for VR should as soon as possible standardise on using a view surface that wraps around you in the first place, instead of to a flat rectangle, so that it is better ready for headsets with wider FOV -- something that is not going to happen without cludges with rasterisation, but could with raytracing, if done right, without unnecessarily shackling itself to legacy technical limitations from broadcasting to CRT televisions.
I have also seen a lot of pupil swim on the physical devices side of things (EDIT2: man, you should see the older Pimax 160° HMDs - hurgh) - especially headsets with conventional (thick) lenses, where things in the virtual world shift around as you turn your head, and you see them through different parts of the optical lens, breaking geometric verity -- this too, there has been some who have been unable to consciously notice (although they may still have got the motion sickness that often comes along with it).
