I think in general VC’s collision detection does not support any kind of “penetration depth” analysis.
It simply calculates whether any of the triangles of the chosen mesh geometries intersect, and if distance is desired to be known, minimum distance between those meshes by calculating distances between vertices, edges, and triangle faces. Also the meshes generally don’t have “inside” and “outside” defined, but it makes no difference for this particular purpose which only considers intersection of the “skin” of objects.
The collision checks are done by “polling”, i.e. is not a continuous process and generally is done at the same time when the 3D world is rendered so the polling interval in simulation time may also vary. This is generally OK for rough analysis and fairly fast to compute, but for reliable results the collision checks should be triggered through API at known accurate enough interval. The new VC OLP features do such more reliable analysis for robot programs.