Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was told the issue isn’t the physical distance of the screen to your eyes, but the distance of where your eyes are focusing? So in VR if you focus on an object a meter away it shouldn’t strain your eyes as much as a phone screen 10cm away? No idea if this is scientifically proven.
Your eyes are still looking at an object (roughly?) 10cm away from your face: the screens. Your eyes are not adjusting focus. Any focus (or blur) you see in VR is simulated depth. So yes, the issue is indeed the distance where your eyes are focussing, caused by the fact that they're constantly focussing on something very close to your face. My optician told me its like stretching your arm while holding something heav…
Technically you can absolutely have something close to your face but focus your eyes far away. If you wear glasses you do that all the time. Just imagine that your glasses are like screens that reproject what's behind them.
You're not totally wrong because there are two components to focusing, one is rotating eyes according to how far is the object and another adjusting each eye's lens. AR/VR can cause them to mismatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence%E2%80%93accommodation...
However the screen imitates focal plane a bit in the distance and THAT's where your eyes are focusing. There's still can be a mismatch because it's a fixed distance, but your eyes are NOT focusing like you strapped a phone to your head which is what you are implying.
(Actually I heard AVP dev guidelines recommend to avoid putting objects too far and too close to keep everything near focal plane probably to miminize the mismatch.)