I remember back in 2008-ish Johnny Lee at CMU built a cool hack that tracked the user's head using a Wiimote as an infrared camera, and used it for this kind of effect.
Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's some component about the effect working best when your head motion is large relative to the distance between your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information from the stereo vision.
I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime where it works well.
https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw?t=147
Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's some component about the effect working best when your head motion is large relative to the distance between your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information from the stereo vision.
I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime where it works well.