I've tried this and if anything I'm even more impressed than the author here. The scenes look at first glance like your standard 360 stereo photos, the ones that only give you three degrees of freedom, but they're not. You can get up close to some of the plants and while it's clear that they use the traditional billboarding technique (a plane mesh with an image texture, and which appears identical on both sides), it's also obvious that the amount of mesh geometry is insane. There are plenty of little details with leaves sticking out that could have simply been omitted without loss of scene quality but they're there anyway. The forest looks like an actual, dense forest, not an idealised test case. Even the most distant trees and branches move with correct parallax. It really looks like millions of individual leaves are being rendered, and, after an initially janky couple of minutes for the first load, it's ultra-smooth. Starting it a second time took seconds and without any initial jankiness.
Okay, maybe not every leaf is an individual object, but damn, it's close. This is more detail than I'd expect my PC to be able to handle and it's running on a standalone headset. And they say this can be done by converting any 3D scene fully automatically !
It's true that when you move outside the box the textures look distorted. I assume that each scene has been texture mapped from the centre of the box, so the further you move away, the more the distortion becomes apparent. But this affects only your most immediate, local environment, not the sense of the overall scene. I didn't notice any loss of detail on that front as I moved outside the boxes at all, although granted my VR space is limited. As for free movement not being intended, that is surely a triviality; if the user walks to a different vantage point, the rendering could presumably be updated automatically to use the new location.
Their website says 45 million + polys, no limits on textures or materials. I don't see anything about dynamic lighting, which would be problematic for games but a relatively minor issue for a host of other uses.
