> Lost Coast [...] This is also how your pupils work, of course.

As a purely temporal change it was neat, but I recall being distinctly annoyed with Lost Coast over how that effect made things worse (less realistic) for scene elements not under the crosshair / gun / avatar's-nose. We naturally expect contrast (and focus, see DoF rant) to improve when we direct our auto-adjusting eyeballs towards the area. In other words, realism of moving between light-environments came at the expense of realism in glancing around the room.

The straightforward fix would be gaze-tracking hardware... but now that I think about it (and with 20 years of tech improvements) I can imagine a much more mad-science approach: Track a simulated visual memory for the avatar!

Imagine a game that tracked recent virtual saccades to build up a cache of data like gaussian splats. So if that player has already seen the black notebook on the black desk in the dark room, it shows up more easily even if they walk in and out of the bright outdoors.