Headset Track Loss

[btwice]

Update:

 

My previous post is no longer valid.  Same issues have surfaced again after relatively normal behavior for several days.

 

Have been saving the System Reports generated by SteamVR app and all end with something like a loss of back facing frames and also an IMU error message.

 

Very frustrating.

 

HTC please help track this down.

 

 

[Rockjaw]

, can I ask a quick question - you say the base stations got five foot closer together. How far apart were they initially? That sounds like a big jump.

[nehumanuscrede]

Had to take a quick measurement before I could reply to your question :D

 

Initially, the two units were fifteen feet apart situated in the corners of my office space. 

During the testing with my tripod, they were roughly ten feet apart. 

 

I have since remounted the left / rear sensor to another position on the wall and the units are now thirteen feet apart. 

 

After the tripod test and subsequent base-station move,  I have not seen a white-out / loss of track condition since. 

[Rockjaw]

Ah, okay. The maximum recommended distance between base stations is 16ft / 5m, so you were pretty close to the limit there. That could be the issue right there!

[MartinMarty]

My Vive has worked fine since January but now I get whiteouts. Usually less than a second, sometimes more, but enough to ruin the immersion and the game/experience, plus I frequently get shot or killed by the enemy while I am blind.

 

I only play Vive a few hours a week. I noticed this problem a couple weeks ago. In that time, Steam, Nvidia and Microsoft have installed updates for sure and I think I remember a Vive update too.

 

I've tried restarting VR, rebooting, turning off AV and other applications. No improvement.

 

I tried adjusting base station position and re-running room setup, but I never had a problem with it before.

 

I am on an i7-3770K @ 3.5GHz with 16GB RAM and Zotac 1080 Amp Extreme. I have all SSD. I know the CPU is dated but it was working fine until recently.

 

My base stations are about 14.8 feet apart. I never measured this before. It was never an issue before.

 

Could ambient light be hurting me now that it is summer? There is no direct sunlight in this room and I have good blinds, etc because it is my office, but cracks do let a photon beam through here and there. I am also under the impressino that reflections could be a problem, but nothing has changed in my space in that regard.

 

Any ideas for me, I sure would appreciate them.

 

Thanks,

-Marty

[MartinMarty]

Here's what I've tried so far, not in this sequence:

• Rebooted/restarted everything multiple times.
• Turned off AV (MSSE under Win10).
• Turned down camera rate from 60 to 30.
• Re-ran room setup making play area smaller (not pushing the limits).
• Adjusted base station position even though I don't think it needed it.
• Disabled option to put base stations to sleep. If they're not going to work properly, might as well burn them up.
• Made sure cables tight in/out of link box and PC and going into HMD.
• For some reason, two times today it wanted to install Bluetooth driver, so I did.
• Yesterday it wanted to install a Vive update so I did even though I thought it ahould have already had that one, 1040 I believe.

It seems like I am likely to get a whiteout whenever my ears are pointed at the base stations. i.e. If we draw a line between the two base stations, whenever my virtual gaze woulkd be perpendicular to that line, I get whiteout. It is as if the HMD cannot be seen from the side. Even when I am relatively in the middle of the play area. It used to work fine. I don't understand what is going on.

 

Are there diagnostics for each component? I suspect the base stations but I don't really know why. I would love to run some diagnostics on them. Seems like sometimes when it goes whiteout I can stare right at a base station for about 5 seconds before it will start tracking again.

 

There is my room and play area (green). The base stations (green) are 14.8 ft apart, up by the ceiling, pointed down at approx. 30º. All the furniture show is short, except the small rectangular bookshelves which are not in position to block the base stations. The round red thing in the middle is supposed to be my head wearing HMD. I can get a whiteout right there sometimes, or turned around 180º. BUT IT USED TO WORK FINE!

 

Thanks for ideas. I'm stressed...

[nehumanuscrede]

I know it used to work previously, but humor me. 

 

Move your base-stations closer together.  About a foot or two should be sufficient.

 

I used to get the white-out issue as well, but I moved one of my basestations out of the corner of the room a bit along the wall which put it a foot or two closer.   Now one of my base stations is in a corner, the rear one is centered between the two corners. 

 

I haven't had a white-out since. 

[MartinMarty]

nehumanus-crede, desperatio hortatur humor. (I googled that just for you)

 

Practically within the same head-scratch as reading your message I came across a youtube video by a young man who suggested that maybe the Vive's instructions for positioning the base stations weren't as important as many of us have been lead to believe. He demonstrated testing them from locations like a shelf, the cushy arm of a recliner and even the floor. In all cases room-scale worked. His video was more from the perspective of not having to drill holes in your walls, but I still thought is applicable.

 

I moved one base station about six feet towards the center of my room to a place that meets none of the documented requirements (on top of a computer on a shelf facing straight ahead, not angled down, eye-level, not in a corner) and it seems to be working great. I have played several games and probably logged a couple of hours with no problem except one time a hand controller twitched  a bit (interestingly, a problem I never had before). Anyway, I had some good games of Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer as well as a couple "VR experience" titles and did not have a single whiteout. With the "experience" games, like TheBlu, I was able to check the far reaches of my play area.

 

To add to my rebellion, I moved the base station that I thought was good rather than the one I suspected was causing the problem.

 

Why did it stop working? Who knows? Intellectually, I am curious, but as long as I am back in business, that's the most important thing.

 

I REALLY appreciate your suggestion. THANKS!!!

 

[Synthesis]

The ambient light certainly could be causing issues. If you have light peaking through a narrow opening between the curtain and the wall, you could test this by moving your headseat through the light while in game and see if you can match up the tracking loss with the light.
WARNING: do NOT allow the light to enter through the lenses. This can cause permanent damage to the display, so if you do this, only expose the plastic front of the HMD to the sunlight.

Other things you can try:
1. Turn off the camera. This can occasionally cause dropped frames until you turn it off. It's quick and worth testing.

2. Connect the sync cable between the base stations and switch to base station channels A and B

 

[Jad]

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wrote:

 

 

Are there diagnostics for each component? I suspect the base stations but I don't really know why. I would love to run some diagnostics on them. Seems like sometimes when it goes whiteout I can stare right at a base station for about 5 seconds before it will start tracking again.

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Yes please check the base stations. Please take up-close pictures of each base station (turned on) with a cell phone camera and send them to me. Also iPhones have an IR filter for the rear camera, so use an Android phone if possible to take the pictures.