For VR, I think that HDR is a must for many games, especially when they are dark/horror games. Remember the (exagerated) focus/brightness auto adjust from the first Mirror edge, trying to mimic our eyes? What if we could just let our eyes do it, with some seriously natural-feeling brightness?
But I sincerely believe that lighting has a VERY long way to go. We still have some pretty lackluster implementations of lighting in modern non-VR games, and ray tracing is probably quite far to what it should be to feel natural. I don't recall seeing a game where a white wall would slightly reflect your bright red shirt when standing next to it, as a basic example (have only seen it done on static elements of the game, not moving players/monsters. If you know examples, please let me know and will happily play them)
I have only seen some ray-tracing on specular reflection objets, and even there it is not the best most of the times.
I would guess that it maybe has a bigger impact than 4K/high resolution on the "feel" of the game.
I understand that it has a huge performance impact, and therefore it is nowhere practical for VR, but when not even normal games are advanced enough, I don't really see realistic lighting on the near future of VR.
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