What is the reason for the field of view in some games narrowing to a small circle? Both eagle flight and the Star Wars VR game do this and it's infuriating. It completely makes all immersion go away.
It happens in Star Wars when you take sharp corners.
It's a comfort setting, to help alleviate the possibility of motion sickness. For some people, the more they see the environment moving around them while they remain stationary, the more it affects their inner ear and they get conflicting signals. The eyes are telling you "You're moving," but the body is telling you, "You're not," and that conflict of input is what creates nausea in some people.
It's one of the reasons why some people get motion sick while reading in cars or buses. It's the opposite effect there where the eyes say you're stationary, but your body is sensing motion. So the way to defeat that mechanism is to hold up your book at a normal angle and eye level, so your peripheral vision registers the motion outside and conforms to your body's belief that you're moving.
So by minimizing just how much motion your eyes see, the narrow vision in VR is an attempt to help some people get over feeling sick. But different people have different sensitivities, and you can get used to it. Many people here at the start of this thread had motion sickness issues, but many of us can now play VR games with all comfort settings disabled.
