HackPerception

@mikemc - I haven't heard anything on this front but the bluetooth receiver that's used for general/power management of the stations is contained within the external tracking faceplate and is not involved at all with your laptops integrated bluetooth radio so that's extra confusing. It could just be a PC specific thing - you could try to isolate out windows by doing a clean install of your OS if you're feeling like using the nuclear optionn (I personally advocate for cleaning installing 1-2 a year minimum, especially on VR machines). The only environmental thing that comes to mind is that you may have alot of co-channel interference from 2.4Ghz WiFi or another RF source (i.e. you lived near a radio/TV tower, a ton of WiFi networks, or high voltage electrical lines).

When preforming any changes to your NVIDIA drivers such as an upgrade or a downgrade for troubleshooting purposes, it may be helpful to perform a “clean installation” of the driver package which can eliminate potentially unwanted settings from impacting your VR user-experience. A clean installation will remove any previous NVIDIA driver settings and user-profiles and restore NVIDIA’s default settings which can eliminate some issues which can otherwise persist between driver updates. As such, a clean installation can be a very important part of troubleshooting SteamVR performance issues as it leaves a blank slate for you to troubleshoot off of. To perform a clean installation, follow the following procedure: 1) Download your desired driver set from NVIDIA’s website. You can download the most recent driver set for your NVIDIA GPU via this link or you can access a specific driver version via this tool. · For VR usage – you should only install “game ready drivers” (GRD), rather than the studio drivers (SD). 2) Download, and launch, and extract the driver’s installer package. 3) On the license agreement page, select if you’d like to install the standalone driver or if you’d also like to install the GeForce Experience software. Click “agree and continue” to proceed. · Note: Usage of the GeForce experience software will require you to register an account with NVIDIA and usage may be prevented if you’re installing onto a secure workstation. 4) Next, on the “installation options” page, select “Custom (Advanced)” and click next. 5) On the “custom installation options” page, click the “preform a clean installation” checkbox and click next to proceed with the installation. Preforming a clean installation can eliminate some types of persistent performance issues related to the driver settings. That said, you will have to manually restore any non-default desired settings that affect VR performance such as your VRSS preferences. When restoring custom settings, it is advisable to make changes one at a time in-case a specific setting negatively impacts your performance.

@Larpushka The issue with all of these end-user solutions like VR treadmills is is that the software you're using has to support that type of locomotion. There isn't a standardized driver that can facilitate this at a universal level. Fortunately there is a third party driver tool call "Natural Locomotion" that specifically has support for that style of tracker based movement you're talking about (user-example). It won't work on everything as it's a middle-ware and it won't be as polished as a developer going in and developing native support but depending on the games you play - you can certainly find some games which work well with Natural Locomotion and it's one of the more popular SteamVR tools. In your case - you'd probably need to pair it with snap turning. Alternatively, if fitness is your main goal, you can try using corridor runner games like Pistol Whip and Beat Saber and just using a treadmill without any sort of trackers. Here's an example of what I'm talking about. As you said in your own post - this is all "do so at your own personal risk" type stuff as you're basically blind to the real world when in VR. edit: I did some searching and apparently NoLo is flexible enough that you can even use Joycons for basic feet tracking.

@Dobieg2002 - Yes, you just have to repair the HMD to the PC within the Vive Wireless console at the start of each session. That's usually a 10-30 second process max - it's pretty quick. Just start the pairing prompt on the PC and when the wireless adapter starts flashing green - press the button on it and you're set. This is actually how we handle HMDs at our offices. Each common VR-PC has a wireless adapter and we just pair HMDs to the PC's wirelessly as needed and it's really smooth. It even works if you're using different HMD types (i.e. Pro, Pro Eye, Cosmos). Think about how much cabling you avoid if you're dealing with 10+ headsets like we often were. Most of the PC's I manage are actually in locked boxes so you can't plug a flashdrive into them and the wireless adapter really helps with security on that front. I would just recommend having each wireless adapter set up to output on a different one of the 3 channels to eliminate any potential cross-talk.

@Gaetano - Yes, it is technically something you can achieve with just a tracker and a minimum of one base-station but it's not considered an officially supported use-case. It's definitely an advanced use-case as without controllers - it's really hard to easily set up your tracking universe. You can use what's called a "null" HMD driver to accomplish this. Please refer to this guide from Triad semiconductor - they're the company who manufacturers the sensors which enable SteamVR tracking. You cannot use trackers whatsoever without the basestations. For virtual production - you'd probably need to get 2 or 3 of the newer 2.0 basestations as well as a tracker 2018 as 2 stations would only cover ~5 meters diagonally which is small area for most lenses. That said, it may actually be cheaper in the long run to buy a kit as you'll add additional complexity by not having an HMD or controllers and you may have higher labor costs in the end as a result of the additional tinkering. A huge portion of virtual production also uses the HMD for playback and pre-viz so the HMD itself certainly has it's place in the production pipeline. If you try to go the 1.0 basestation route - it will work but you'll be limited to 5m's diagonally. Whatever you do - do not try to buy used basestations off ebay or another reseller site. They're mechanical devices and it's the equivalent of buying a car with 200,000KM already on the odometer.

This Webinar will start in ~1 hour 🙃

+1 on it potentially being thermal throttling based on you saying that it gets worse as the session progresses. You may want to look into a cooling pad - if you have a fan lying around you can experiment with using that to cool the rig to see if it makes a difference before making the commitment. You could also try going into whatever BIOS or software is on your rig to disable the throttling but only do so if you have external cooling in place otherwise you can damage your hardware. Bear in mind Boneworks isn't a light application at all due to the texturing and physics simulations. The 1060 is their minimum requirements for first gen HMDs so expecting it to run at max settings on a laptop version of a 1060 is not a very realistic expectation of your laptop and if you had automatic scaling on - it may have been able to run with those settings only via down-sampling.

On that note - a subpac is one of the better VR accessories you can buy since they work outside of VR. It looks like the MX2 is EOL though and they're asking for suggestions for their next model.

I used to be super hardcore in the PCMR camp but having a VR laptop has opened up so many opportunities for me and has allowed me to share VR experiences with a huge number of people in a variety of crazy places. I think laptops certainly have their place in helping VR gain consumer legs and that as edge computing kicks in the lines will blur between desktop and mobile. It's very awesome being able to have a complete "desktop" VR rig that's self contained within in my backpack and can run off an external battery bank - I've taken headsets to dozens of festivals at this point. For the the vast majority of people though - I think the money is better spent on a GTX2060/2070 desktop rig.

@McyD - The offical battery is currently in stock on the EU site here. The lack of listing on our US site would indicate it being out of stock - it's definitely been listed on there before previously. As you can imagine - moving stock around is incredibly challenging right now with COVID. If current users need one - they may be able to get one through our customer care channels as we generally set aside stock for care. The battery for Cosmos was not manufactured by HTC but was instead contracted out to a manufacturing partner who specializes that type of gear which allowed us to reduce the cost to the end user as a direct result of user feedback about the price of the 18w packs.

@SanityGaming - There may be some movement on this front - we'll keep trying to get stock to them but it's an extremely complex situation and they're the decision makers in this situation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-13/amazon-move-to-stock-more-non-essentials-isn-t-business-as-usual?srnd=technology-vp

@CCONX We do not offer or stock any sort of USB-C to Displayport adapter as it's very hard to ensure one works across all hardware In the past, we've recommended this adapter as it's proven to be fairly dependable. The key in selecting an adapter is that is has to support 4K @ 60hz which is the bandwidth threshold you need to meet or exceed. There is a minimum of 8 variations of the Predator-300 all with different specs. I clicked around and none of these spec sheets specifically list discrete Displayport support on any of the USB-C ports. I'd highly recommend going into the PhyX panel within your Nvidia control panel and posting a screenshot of it back here before trying to source an adapter. This will show you the port mapping of your PC to the internal hardware. I've posted an example below of a laptop where the Minidisplayport is hooked up to the Nvidia card but the USB-C is only hooked up to the Intel card. If the port mapping shows that your USB-C port is not hooked up to your discrete GPU and only your Intel integrated graphics, your PC is unfortunately incompatible with any Displayport 1.2+ driven headset including Cosmos, Pro, Rift S, and Index. You'd be limited to first-gen HDMI driven headsets.

@jhintze - Yes, the USB-C port on the Cosmos can be used for headphones. The Google USB-C -> 3.5mm adapter is arguably the safest bet and is our offical recommendation for Vive Pro - it's very high quality and considered an industry standard solution but I've had luck with one or two other adapters I've tested. Here are the instructions to detach the stock headphones.

Bumping this post to remind everybody that this live Webinar will happen tomorrow morning 😁

@laggy vive user In these cases I always recommend downloading the latest Nvidia driver and then preforming a "clean installation" by choosing the advanced setup and checking the clean installation box. I also recommend going into SteamVR -> Video and experiment with turning off the global motion smoothing setting and also using the legacy re projection option (on a per application basis).

@Fink - I shared my personal thoughts - what they're doing is really really hard and I'm super happy that they're trying to bring this to market. SteamVR is open enough ecosystem that I see it complimenting Vive devices. I'm a huge proponent of hand tracking and I personally have a very strong preference for hand tracking solutions that are not camera based but are electromagnetic based. I personally am not comfortable using the camera based solutions from certain other manufacturers due to the privacy loss. I was a really strong holdout on the virtual track-pads - I'm one of those people that had 3 or 4 Steam controllers. That said, I'm coming around to thumbsticks something hard, especially after playing Saints and Sinners, and so that would be my primary UX concern around the Etee's. Thumb-sticks are much more important to me now that we have content that specifically optimized for thumbsticks but I'm open to other implementations of the virtual trackpad and these are really slick.

@folkers_5150, I've posted this a few times on various forum posts but I'm just one VR-nerd and it's a pretty common misconception. I'm not even on a hardware team at Vive - I just am just a VR fanboi. One verification thing you can use is taking a photo of the stations with your phone. In a working station you'll see two dots that represent the laser aperture as in the example below. With a broken station, you'll commonly see only one of the dots. Never buy base-stations used/secondhand. It's like buying a car with 200,000KM already on the odometer. There isn't a huge UX upgrade with 2.0 stations if you're an in-home user and only using 2 stations. I actually personally find 1.0 tracking to be more reliable in reflective environments. It's not like the tracking quality is vastly superior because it's newer tech. If switching to 2.0 your options are effectively a Vive Cosmos HMD only upgrade (just announced last week), a Vive Pro, or a Valve Index. I know it's extra tough down in your region though due to all of the import weirdness.

@Fink - Bringing controllers to market is rather difficult - as a manufacturer takes a huge amount of effort and coordination to get SteamVR to then you have to get that added into the and then to boot, every single developer has to integrate your controllers into their project either natively or by updating their SteamVR/OpenVR plugin - otherwise you have to fallback to SteamVR's controller remapping which isn't a very elegant solution at scale. Designing a VR controller for mass market is no-joke and I applaud the Etee team for their efforts - what they're doing it not easy at all. That said, from an end-user prospective, it may not be something you plug in and it simply works - especially at launch. Since no other knuckles-like controllers have launched, it remains to be seen how software support will play out across the ecosystem. To have true native and optimized support for a controller requires you to see developer kits to hundreds and hundreds of dev teams and there is a financial component as well as it costs them dev hours to integrate and optimize. Piggybacking off SteamVR input in theory will help reduce the owance on developers but there aren't a huge number of real-world data points to actually judge how that works in the real-world yet.

@JohnyDL - It already does this? You shouldn't be able to access the "Vive roomsetup" application from the Vive console without the correct faceplate installed. The option in the Vive console should be greyed out and inaccessible and if you were to somehow manually launch it, it wouldn't proceed without the optical face-plate. If you don't have a valid lighthouse roomsetup SteamVR would detect that and automatically launch the prompt. I use both an external tracking faceplate as well as the optical tracking faceplate on my machine and have never had conflicts. I have have both a lighthouse tracking roomsetup and an optical roomsetup and can switch back and forth between the two without having to re-run setup.

@folkers_5150: This is a notorius point of confusion in the Vive community. The general gist is: The earlier basestation 1.0 firmware versions did not have self-diagnostics or error detection. A basestation with a broken laser or rotor will emit bad tracking data because it's unable to tell that somethings wrong nor is it able to report back to SteamVR compositor that something is wrong. This is what you're experiencing when you roll back the firmware manually - you're reverting to a firmware version that is unable to detect that something is wrong so it blasts your playspace with invalid tracking data leading to tracking issues. The firmware rollback procedure you described was initially shared by a Valve employee who later publicly stated they regretted sharing the procedure to do how much confusion and frustration it's caused within the community. You're not actually fixing anything with the rollback - you're just hiding the error messages and allow the station to spit out bad data. Basestations are mechanical devices - each motor in a basestation spins at 3600 RPM (200,000+ per hour). They can wear down and break after extended usage cycles or through violent shocks. The best way to maximize the lifespan of a basestation is to use basestation power management to turn off the stations when they're not in use. If you're under warranty - you may be able to get a device repaired under warranty If you have the original Vive, the 2.0 stations are not compatible with your HMD. Furthermore, 2.0 stations are mechanical devices and are subject to the same basic mechanical constraints as 1.0 stations.

@RMFMargo, Which generation base-station and which color? Unless it's blinking blue (bluetooth standby), a blinking indicator on a base-station generally indicates a mechanical failure that requires physical servicing.

@Yakko Try downloading a free title from Steam like the budget cuts demo or Google Earth VR

Working Remotely? On April 14th at 10am PST learn how VR can benefit you and your team. Register here. You can still view last Tuesday's GDC Webinar here: Build for Tomorrow: VIVE Hand Tracking SDK For more information on the upcoming sessions, check out the Vive Blog. Tuesday, April 21 @ 10am PT – Lessons Learned from Marketing 100+VR Games Tuesday, April 28 @ 10am PT – Viveport Developer Console: What’s Coming in 2020 Tuesday, May 5 @ 10am PT – XR Continuum: Merging VR & AR Development Tuesday, May 12 @ 10am PT – What’s the Opportunity in Enterprise?

@Khronno - It's hyper-dependent on where you are - some regions are pretty locked down. To my knowledge, there are currently no major delays within our fulfillment centers but once that package is out in the world it's going to be really specific to where you're shipping to. In the past few weeks the overall volume of packages has decreased alot and things are generally starting to recover a bit but if you're shipping to really hard hit regions like NYC, Italy, or France - you could incur additional delays.

@csabal Instructions for what part of the tech stack? If you're talking about the Optitrack hybridization - that support comes from Optitrack. We do not work with Optitrack to develop their hybridized tracking solutions - that's solely their effort and it technically is a competitive tracking solution to the tracking solutions we're integrating into our products.