What if they played it longer because they were interested in looking at the nose, to see how light affects it as you turn around? I for one would definitely do that.
Funny what all gets filtered out. When I'm wearing my extremely old plastic glasses (real ones, not VR), I do not perceive the myriad of scratches on it either, though it certainly contributes to less resolution of what I see, but I'm not aware. Most people are shocked when they get new glasses/lenses/eyes about the increase in detail they weren't aware of.
There's a less computational explanation for that. Your glasses sit very close to your face, meaning that any scratches are dramatically out of focus; the degradation gets spread over your entire visual field.
Which is not to say that you wouldn't have gotten used to and started ignoring a scratch you could see, because you're right; you would have. But that's not what's actually going on.
How do you know that's not what's actually going on? You may be different, but when I wear glasses, they're sufficiently far from my eyes that imperfections are quite visible as localized phenomena. They're not in focus, but they're nowhere close to spread out over the entire visual field. Specks of dust show up as blobs of dust. Scratches show up as fuzzy lines.
I'm going to guess that the person you're replying to is sufficiently familiar with his glasses to know what he actually sees.
"[...] But it is a promising start, particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there" - it's right there in the article.
