Prevent dropping out of application if main thread stalls from loading

Hey there,

I asked this question in the Unity forums but didn't get any luck and this is an Oculus specific issue.

Here are the steps we take to transition levels:

1. Fade down to black
2. Unload previous scene if there was one (there is a persistent level though which keeps the camera etc.)
3. Load the new scene
4. Fade up from black

This works fine on other platforms such as Vive though bare in mind I am using the SteamVR/OpenVR SDK not the Oculus one. 

On Oculus it seems that the main thread gets stalled during the loading process which causes a frame rate drop which forces a brief drop out of the application. So we fade down to black then it pops white and shows the sensors in front then goes back to black and fades back into the scene. Is there any way to get around this forced behaviour? I can see why the runtime does it to avoid users being in a low framerate app that might causes motion sickness but in this instance it actually makes the problem worse. 

Note that we don't have the option to make the levels/assets loaded any smaller and this occurs even when loading a few small assets additively (as we use a similar technique to the loading routine to bring in additional assets). 

Thank you