2.0 Base Station tracks poorly after repair

[Mrtaylorisaac]

Greetings! I been having some issues with my Basestation, It just recently came back from repair for a dead diode, but now its having trouble tracking. Some of the problems I've seen are; controller jittering, inaccurate movement, and jumps. I've concluded its the basestation because I've troublshooted throughly with a combination of different controllers and individually using each basestation, along with removing any reflective surfaces that might cause interference. The video below demonstrates these issues. Thank you for your time.

Controller_Jitter.mkv

[TomCgcmfc]

Does not look too bad to me.  With my 2.0 base stations/controllers I get the odd bit of jittering depending on where/how I place them.  Seems worse if I lay them down on the top of my desk.  On rare occasions one controller will fly off into the distance and then come back later, lol!  I do have a couple of small reflective areas in my PC room ; window w/blinds on my left, PC glass cover case front-right on my desk.  In any game/sim this jittering does not seem to happen unless I lay one of my controllers down on the top of my desk so I have not really worried about this.  I also put my stations into sleep mode when exiting SteamVR.  Also, I found early on it's important to firmly mount these above head height, pointed downward.  But you probably already know this.  Also, check that your firmware on both stations, both controllers, and your headset is updated to the current version.

If this is effecting tracking in your games I guess you need to contact Vive Support again and let them know.  Good luck mate.

[HackPerception]

@Mrtaylorisaac - Please see below for instructions on how to verify if it's a reflection issue. Usually controllers flying off in a direction is a symptom of reflections.

"Reflective surfaces" in practice are extraordinarily hard to track down without specialized equipment because materials interact differently with IR light than optical light. A material may not be reflective in the visible spectrum but may be highly reflective in the IR spectrum; the same is true with opacity, some visibly opaque materials will be complete transparent in IR and vice versa. To detect reflections, generate a system report or open up the SteamVR web console and search for the term "back-facing". I'll post an example of what a reflection looks like in the logs below.

• Sun Jun 26 2016 23:02:09.676 - lighthouse: LHR-4E8EF209 H: Dropped 32312 back-facing hits, 2069 non-clustered hits during the previous tracking session

[Mrtaylorisaac]

40 minutes ago, VibrantNebula said:

@Mrtaylorisaac - Please see below for instructions on how to verify if it's a reflection issue. Usually controllers flying off in a direction is a symptom of reflections.

"Reflective surfaces" in practice are extraordinarily hard to track down without specialized equipment because materials interact differently with IR light than optical light. A material may not be reflective in the visible spectrum but may be highly reflective in the IR spectrum; the same is true with opacity, some visibly opaque materials will be complete transparent in IR and vice versa. To detect reflections, generate a system report or open up the SteamVR web console and search for the term "back-facing". I'll post an example of what a reflection looks like in the logs below.

• Sun Jun 26 2016 23:02:09.676 - lighthouse: LHR-4E8EF209 H: Dropped 32312 back-facing hits, 2069 non-clustered hits during the previous tracking session

Greetings Vibrant, I followed your instructions and left my headset and controllers facing the basestation for around 5 minutes although I didn't see any dropped hits in the console except for when I closed SteamVR, although I'm guessing thats because it turned the diode off to go to sleep. I have the log if needed, Thanks for your help!

[HackPerception]

@Mrtaylorisaac You'd actually want to move around and play until you capture the behavior in action - hopefully it will result in an output to the logs. If it's a reflection you'll get a back-facing hit output. If it's something else, it may hopefully be recorded in the logs.

[Mrtaylorisaac]

I tried again while wearing the headset, and got a couple dropped hits, ranging from 500 - 1100. Is this the normal amount?

[Mrtaylorisaac]

Also, I have the log if needed.

[HackPerception]

@Mrtaylorisaac So that confirms there's at least one position in your play-space where reflections are impacting your tracking to some degree. The tricky thing about it is that the SteamVR logs don't tell you over what period of time those back-facing hits occur. 500-1100 isn't alot if it's spread out over a long play session but that's a ton if it happens all in a short burst. Base stations operate at 120hz so 500-1000 back-facing hits all at once could represent 5-20 seconds of bad data which could result in your hands flying off in a weird direction (which is a classic reflection behavior). It does tell you which base-station is emitting the bad data though which can be helpful. If you can reliably figure out a spot in the room where it happens, you can do some rough angle math to try and figure out which surfaces may be causing the problem.

This is a nifty lifehack that provides a good approximation. You can use something like your finger over your cellphone's LED to create the effect. It's tricky though since the flashlight is optical light and IR light interacts with materials - it can only afford an approximation.

[HackPerception]

I would also recommend trying a session with only the repaired station powered on. That should give you a good indication of it's tracking quality. That said, the 2.0 stations have pretty good self-diagnostics features embedded into the firmware and generally don't emit tracking data unless the motors are spinning at a very precise speed. With the exception of environmental factors - the basestations are all or nothing; they either are operating correctly and emit data or the firmware detects something is iffy and shuts it down.