I have a 7.1 system with a large subwoofer and game most of the time with headphones. You're right that you won't get directional audio from a home theater setup, so you use headphones. Simple as that. I have a good pair that really rattle my brain when the bass hits, but if you need to feel it in your chest, there's options. It'd be quick to write a piece of software that can mirror the LFE channel to your 7.1 system so you still get the volume filling bass as well as some from your headphones. Another options is something like the Buttkicker on the floor instead of a couch.
It's far from an insurmountable obstacle and is easily fixed with existing products or a little software.
I agree. Since low frequencies are more felt than heard using a good true subwoofer and/or a buttkicker will solve that problem.
Headphones have been the standard in immersive audio before all the buzzwords (quadrophonic, dolby surround, dts, dolby digital, blah blah, atmos). Binaural recordings were first, then Head Related Transfer Functions were used to create immersive headphone audio.
The principle is simple, you have only 2 ears and with those you can perceive height, depth, direction everything. All of that with 2 ears. There used to be a demo in Epcot center decades ago where you put on headphones and it put you right inside a virtual barber appointment hair dryer and all. It sounded exactly like the real thing. The difference being someone mastered that audio for that purpose. With newer 8 channel+ audio formats someone mastered it for that many positions which needs to be converted in real time back to 2 channel binaural.
What people with home surround setups fail to realize is that the room interaction aspects make it nearly impossible to setup correctly in a home. There are primitive room correction techniques in today's receivers but headphone audio obviates the whole thing.
When you listen to something like Dolby Atmos in a theater the level of detail that went into every aspect of that room design and speaker positioning and correction is something only a true professional can do. You need acoustic engineers working for days if not weeks to set up and test that. The room treatments alone cost thousands if not tens of thousands even in a small dedicated home theater. It needs to be designed and built with acoustic engineering from the ground up.
Again headphones can do this perfectly without all this design hassle. Dolby Atmos at home sadly sounds like another buzzword. They slapped the name on a soundbar. So clearly there are levels of delivery at play here.
EDIT: I'm not laughing at Atmos for what it is. It's a new way to mix surround audio from the content creation side. It's just that it piggy backs on existing delivery methods that makes it irrelevant from the content delivery side. It does not define its own room correction or delivery setup beyond having drive units pointing upwards to emulate ceiling height channels. That is a good idea in home setups no doubt. Also it works with any delivery system including soundbars featuring for example YPAO from Yamaha. It's good thing for cinema mastered audio but it has no relevance to VR. The Atmos soundtrack must be custom mastered for each movie. Their attempt to bring that movie theater mix to the home is laudable. They did the best they could. But again surround fields in a home setup involve so much complication that less than 1% of home theaters can get it right. Headphones on the other hand can do it with a purely digital implementation. Room acoustics are taken out of the equation. Room surround is about letting more than one person hear roughly the same thing. Headphones are limited to one person - the person wearing the headphones. But that is an advantage in that two or more people wearing headphones can have the ideal soundfield based on exactly where they are positioned. It just needs to be calculated per individual headphone and user position.
In surround audio the room is everything. If the technology came with it's own defined digital room correction I would be excited. Instead apparently it is to be used with whatever existing room correction of the user's choice such as Audyssey, or YPAO, Dirac etc.
A comprehensive home surround format needs room correction built in. In a real space the room correction is the secret sauce. In a headphone it is the well known HRTF.
Long story short headphones handle directional audio better than speakers except for low bass. That should be intuitive considering you have only 2 ears not 18 or 22 or how ever many speakers the next new system wants to have you buy. But with a standard put into place for VR headphone directional audio it can all be done with headphones.