Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics.
I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right.
ETA:
I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV.
That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.
I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic.
I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.
It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.
I remember back in 2008-ish Johnny Lee at CMU built a cool hack that tracked the user's head using a Wiimote as an infrared camera, and used it for this kind of effect.
Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's some component about the effect working best when your head motion is large relative to the distance between your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information from the stereo vision.
I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime where it works well.
There are tons of working examples of head-tracked 3D, and in practice it's good enough to satisfy most viewers (as long as you can deal with the obvious limitation: only one viewer at a time)
I bet it has nothing to do with the graphics or the physics and everything to do with the fact that you can't feel the ball. There's vibrations that can be felt when you play with a real pinball machine.
That's definitely part of it, but even when I play Pinball FX on my laptop with a keyboard, it still feels better than the one I tried at the mall.
The one I felt at the mall kind of felt like I was playing on the moon. The ball felt really floaty and the way the ball bounced off the walls and bumpers just didn't feel or look right.
Adding some kind of "thumper" feedback would have certainly helped the experience though.
Simulating airdrag and turbulence the compute-intensive way: simulating all of the air inside the pinball machine! You've got a few tens of liters of gaseous molecules to keep track of, should be enough to slow down most computers I would guess!
But I would be very surprised if any pinball software actually does that!
No one does it yet! Someone should import OpenFOAM into Unreal and make this happen. I want my pinball experience to require a dedicated server to help it.
I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right.
ETA:
I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV.
That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.