The near field in VR
If you fly in a headset, you may have noticed that the world looks strangely flat. Not broken, not wrong, just oddly like a very good photograph. Two things were going on, and only one of them was ours.
The part that isn't ours is physics. Your two eyes are about 63 mm apart, and the difference between what they see shrinks with distance. On a headset panel at roughly 20 to 25 pixels per degree, that difference drops below a single pixel somewhere around 90 metres. Past that point there is literally nothing to draw differently for the left eye and the right eye. At cruising altitude the whole planet sits well beyond it, which is why a real pilot doesn't get depth from stereo either. They get it from parallax as they move, and from haze, and so do you.
The part that was ours: inside that 90-metre range, we had hidden the only object that was ever going to be there. First person mode switched your own aircraft off, so the headset was left with nothing nearer than the horizon to build depth out of.
That is fixed now. In VR first person the gull and the quad are drawn again. On the bird, the wings beat about 25 cm below you with a 74 cm span, so they swing through your lower vision as you flap. On the quad, the arms and the two front props sit out at roughly 45 degrees, about 45 cm away, which also happens to be exactly what a real FPV feed looks like.
A couple of parts had to be left out, and for the same reason in both cases: they sit in front of the camera rather than around it. The gull's head was the original reason all of this was hidden, since your eyes ride above the body and the head ends up at your chin. The quad's own FPV camera nub covers about 25 degrees just above centre, and a real pilot never sees the camera they are looking through. Both are switched off in first person and come straight back in the chase and orbit views.
While we were in there, the gull's beak got its depth back. On a monitor we draw it 24 times larger and 24 times further away than it is authored, which looks identical through one lens and saves us from the 2 metre near plane. Two lenses are not fooled by that trick. Stereo was reporting a seven-metre beak five metres out, and leaning your head slid it like scenery instead of swinging it like something on your face. In VR the near plane is already 0.1 m, so the beak is now drawn where it was designed to be, about 20 cm from your eyes.
The binoculars needed a small fix to go with it. They render a 16 degree telephoto view from the same point your eyes are at, and a beak 20 cm away would have filled the eyepiece end to end, so the beak is hidden for that pass along with the rest of the cockpit.
Nothing changed on a monitor. Desktop first person still hides your aircraft exactly as before.
Because 20 cm is close, the beak is now a setting. "Show your own beak" sits with the mirrors in Settings, and it is also a row in the VR menu, since a headset is the one place where you can't reach for the mouse. It is on by default, it follows your account rather than the machine you set it on, and it applies on screen as well, so if you turn it off to clear your view in VR, the beak trim you bought stops showing on the monitor too. Say so if you want those split into two switches.
One known gap: the realistic skinned gull, the one behind the ?bird=real flag, keeps the old behaviour for now. Its head is part of a single mesh rather than a separate group, so we can't switch just the head off yet, and showing the whole thing would put two beaks in your view at once.