Do you mean the SteamVRChaperoneComponent that epic created? Because the ACTUAL steamVR chaperone is composited in later and isn’t effected by gameplay.
For the simple character the chaperone component isn’t going to function visually because the entire character moves when the HMD moves. The OutOfBounds and InBounds functions should still work correctly, but the component itself will follow you with your motions so anything you attach to it won’t behave the same.
Its one of the downsides of the simple character being outside of Epics preferred VR workflow. You can still manually place objects around you by offsetting by the HMD location. But in the end it would probably be easier to just use the VRCharacter.
I also think you might be confused by the naming convention in the template, the Vive_PawnCharacter and SimpleVive_PawnCharacter are the same blueprint base, the Simple tag isn’t saying that it has less implemented in it, the Simple tag is saying that it uses the SimpleVRCharacter c++ class.
I intend to make a basic barebones character for the template soon so people don’t have to remove a bunch of things they don’t need, but until then if you just want a basic character you should make a new one and only port over what you want, everyone is going to want something different.