I am able to manually enter VR Shell via an NFC tag scan just fine. However, entering VR Shell in end-to-end tests results in a black screen (no content, background, or pointer), although the overlay is still present.

Reproducible by adding the following "test" case to VrShellTest.java:

@LargeTest
public void testBlackScreen() {
  VrUtils.forceEnterVr();
  SystemClock.sleep(20000);
}

Using VrUtils.simNfc(getActivity()) instead of forceEnterVr() also reproduces.

GN args (same as the FYI bot is using):
is_component_build=false is_debug=true proprietary_codecs=true strip_absolute_paths_from_debug_symbols=true symbol_level=1 target_os="android" use_goma=true ffmpeg_branding="Chrome"

Interestingly, if you remove the forceEnterVr() (so all the test does is sleep) and instead manually scan an actual NFC tag during the test, the issue still occurs, so it looks like the instrumentation tests being present might somehow be affecting the behavior of Chrome/VR Shell.