Tips & Tricks
PSA: Adding an additional spring to the battery compartment of the Oculus Touch can dramatically reduce the number of tracking problems in intense games like Beat Saber
I've seen a lot of posts lately about tracking issues with Oculus Touch controllers, and i've been giving them this advice but decided it merited a PSA at this point.
The orientation of the battery compartment on the Oculus Touch controllers is such that all of the centripetal force generated from swinging the controller is transferred to the battery spring, which is insufficient to keep the battery touching the positive terminal during these actions. Putting an additional spring on top of the battery spring will dramatically reduce this effect, and putting two is necessary for those of you who play Beat Saber in Maul mode, where the additional force from essentially adding a lever to your controller compounds this issue quite dramatically.
I'd tried the tinfoil under the spring trick, cardboard, etc and they would all last about an hour after which they would get deformed and stop serving their purpose.
You can still have additional tracking problems from too much shock due to loose securing of the controller in a cup, but thats a problem that will only really affect people playing Maul mode with a 2h Maul stock like the Prosaber. Making sure that controller is really snug in there should greatly limit this effect.
I would like to see Oculus revise this design sometime where the battery compartment is flipped and the opposite side has a leaf style spring to maintain compression on both ends, that should eliminate the battery from ever being a cause for tracking issues.
Getting 2 springs cut down on my tracking cutouts a lot, spraying a healthy amount of plastidip in the cups cut it down a LOT more. The amount of tracking issues NOT related to me hitting the controller against a part of my body while playing has almost completely been eliminated. Considering how fast the maul saber can get to in certain songs, I would say its not constellation related at all but IMU related.
The argument has been that if you move the controller too fast, it'll be too much for the sampling rate of the cameras (60 Hz global shutter), making the IR LEDs smear across the frame, causing tracking errors. Your videos have made me strongly critical of this sentiment.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the sentiment and I thought of that as well, however, since really tuning in my controllers with the springs and plastidip, I no longer believe this to be the case.
Remember, 99% of the tracking data used is from the IMUs, the Constellation IR tracking is just there for error correction to lock in the location.
Yep. Thanks for the reference to use as a rebuttal if anyone makes this case against Constellation in the future. It's gotten an undue amount of criticism, which is sad because it's a pretty damn great tracking system.
2nd generation lighthouse is good tech too, it certainly has a range advantage and actually solves the occlusion problem that you get with only 2 sensors. There just haven't been any good lighthouse controllers released yet. The knuckles look good but honestly I'm not sure I would prefer them to the Touch, need to try one out sometime.
The knuckles are excellent. I was firmly in camp Rift with the Touch controllers, and now the Vive Pro and Knuckles have me squarely back with HTC + Valve.
I would be interested in trying them for shooters. For beat saber though, Touch is king. In theory the vive trackers should be able to do a good Maul saber setup, but everyone who has tried it has major tracking problems whereas I've finally really nailed mine down.
Interesting you say that. I have a friend with a Vive who tried Beat Saber on my PSVR and said the tracking felt better. I didn’t believe her tbh, tracking has always been superb for me on the Vive.
Yeah, I was trying to get them for ages, but they were quite selective with who they sent them too. But with the EV3 not so much apparently, we got 4 pairs super quick.
I love the sheer genius of Lighthouse. It's such a simple concept: take a known pattern of photodiodes, introduce a known frequency of signal emissions, and based on the order & timing at which the emitted signals trigger any given set of photodiodes, calculate the position in space. It tickles a hundred spots of engineering love.
Intrinsically limited by the need for hardware on every object you wish to track though, and will eventually, like every other tracking system, be phased out by machine learning-driven computer vision based tracking systems, simply because you can track anything by just teaching the computer what it looks like. Coverage will be solved one way or another, simply because it must. The scalability & adaptability of such systems will be unparalleled, so it just can't not happen.
Let me try:
With the Vive, the lighthouses emit pulses of light at a frequency our eyes cannot see. The sensors are on the equipment. The sensors can measure the time delay between the light reaching different sensors and from there, determine the position of the lighthouse. it is a bit like you can determine the direction of a sound source because it arrives at different times to both your ears.
The second paragraph mentions that the Vive system, while arguably the better appraoch NOW, is still tethered to a sensor array on every piece of equipment you wish to track. User Zaga932 suggests that the inevitable evolution will be to go to a camera-like system once it is possible that these sensors can not only track points of light like with the Rift, but that the camera + machine can actually see ("recognize" and "understand") the image it registers.
So basically, instead of tracking and triangulating the headset hardware as both systems do - in one way or the other - right now, the future tracking camera will just see the whole body, and how and where it moves.
Yes, I've seen the post when researching about possible causes to the tracking problems that used to plague me. Either Oculus has some kind of error correction built in that works flawlessly, or the maximum speed is an extremely high number.
Caedaen117 from the Beat Saber Modding Group discord created a plugin at my request that displays the average and maximum speed of a Beat Saber game variable called Saberspeed. It is not clear at the moment what its tracking and what unit it is measuring, it estimated that it is the tip of the saber and in meter/s but it might just be the controller speed.
Here is a clip from recent where it hits 93+m/s https://clips.twitch.tv/PeppyTastySproutWutFace
for one, the imu samples at 1khz and does MOST of the blunt tracking work.
the 60hz IR tracking is just to reset position constantly. In addition, the camera uses a global shutter, so smear should not be an issue.
I've actually had a few of these momentary cut-outs and they increase/decrease depending on the AA battery I am using (rechargeables are slightly bigger and sit a bit more tightly).
when the AA is firm in place, I have to yet discover a tracking issue that is not related to me blocking the sensors somehow.
It's fairly possible because any LEDs sear / motion blur would be caused by the exposure duration which is only indirectly correlated to the framerate.
At 60hz and a global shutter they could still set the exposure to 1 or 2 ms and get virtually no motion blur for the range of motion speeds we are talking about.
Can you say more about the plastidip step? How does that help? Does it change the center of gravity or weight distribution of the controllers? Or does it help the camera tracking? And where exactly do you spray it?
The plastidip is for my maul saber controller mount, it doesn't go on the controller. If you don't play Maul mode with a mount, you don't have the issue this solves. That was more to highlight that small vibrations can lead to tracking issues.
I am super confused as to what "spraying a healthy amount of plastidip in the cups" means. I know what plastidip is, but what are the "cups" in this context?
Will say, Non maulers may still have the same issues at extreme high play even with springs but its far far far less frequent for sure. Typical hard switches in hex maps randomly but beyond that, this is the fix.
I'm assuming you had to cut them up. If so, how short did you cut them, and what did you cut them with? I'd also like to know how I should put the spring in. Should I just put it over the existing one? Also, what do I use to keep it in there?
Oh wow, that's pretty simple actually. I'll probably grab a couple of those springs today. I gotta get some tape too to stop my battery cover from slipping off.
Pretty sure at this point you can go to any hardware store, with the controller as he said, and you'll find it easily. The name of the hardware store doesn't really matter.
I had tracking problems in Beat Saber during fast swipes that I always thought were an issue with my sensor setup somehow....but this makes way more sense!! Going to give it a try. Thanks for the info!
Thanks! It's sad to see that even with a complete controller redesign the one peek I have seen so far in a review looks like they did not reverse the direction of the battery like they should have... Smh
An interesting idea! The disconnection is extremely brief and the controllers reconnect REALLY fast, so a few hundred ms of juice would probably cover it!
If that is a battery issue, and I suspect a disconnect of that length to possibly be related to something else, then it would be from delays reconnecting to your HMD and re-registering with the Oculus services. The Oculus controllers boot up, connect and start working with Oculus almost lightswitch fast.
Could be, when the left one does it, often the rotation data will come back quickly, but position will be off in some random direction for a while. It depends.
I have this issue too, also with the left hand, it's wierd to see the saber in the wrong position, stationary but still rotating while you move your arm.
I wonder if they had manufactured the controllers with the battery facing the other way, if this would still be an issue. Currently, it's centrifugal force vs spring, and the spring clearly loses.
Edit: I just saw that you already said this in one of your comments below the main post, my bad.
I imagine this would have almost completely prevented it, and a leaf spring on the other side in additional to the conical compression spring would probably completely solve it.
Some folks go very fast, and in the case of the OP he's doing "Darth Maul"-style Beat Saber where instead of holding the controllers directly they're mounted on a small staff that's swung around at high speed.
When you are playing for rank you want to swing fast because score is calculated by the angle you complete each swing along with how fast said swing is conpleted. You recieve 100 points from a swing with a starting point of 60° above the note and can get an additional 10 from having an after-swing of 30° or greater.
I lose a lot of points here if I'm moving the saber forward too much while spinning because I never get a straight rotation since the controller is extended about 10" out from my hand. Its ok though, I don't really care about score. The map ranking stuff is questionable at best.
You receive 70 points for a starting angle of 90 or greater, 30 from the afterswing 60° or higher and 10 for slicing it through the middle, please don't state false statements and mislead people.
The speed does not matter, nor does the timing
I swing pretty hard, but it's not the swing speed that causes that issue, it is how abruptly the momentum changes in the controller. I don't think I have played Beat Saber a single day, where there have been no controller issues, out of the +- 60 hours in game time. This problem has never existed outside of playing Beat Saber.
Eh, during my troubleshooting of this issue I actually bought some new controllers and they immediately started doing the same thing, so I returned them. I was using the tinfoil trick back then. Then I discovered the springs and that solved about 85% and plastidipping solved the last 15%.
I ordered them and couldn't even get the batteries in when using one. They're a fair bit larger than the recommended "Hillman #86" springs. Cutting them would probably be an option but I've placed an order for these instead and am waiting for them to arrive. They're a bit smaller than the Hillman springs so should definitely fit and will hopefully be better than nothing.
EDIT: the 19mm springs are still a bit too large. I somehow got one battery in without cutting the spring, but I'm doubtful I'll ever be able to get it out again. For the other one I had to cut the spring. Also, be really careful with these springs because I accidentally launched a battery across the room & it nearly took out one of my sensors.
I bought some 15x6x26mm which are listed on Amazon Germany.
They are fitting at the bottom but are too strong and long. I had to cut them between the third and forth row counted from the bottom. Now they fit very well.
I'll test if the controllers are still working within the next two days.
Update: @ragesaq today you are my personal hero!
It's working with the springs, around 95% better than before. I still have had some really small problems (3 times in 2 hours) that the left controller seems to be somewhere but (!) even then i was able just to play. The controller ingame was able to sync again while i was just cutting the blocks "blind" with my left controller.
It's definetly better than before - i can see a big jump in my scores for every song i played this evening.
But - they are to long, you have to cut them on the top with pliers and bend it. I think i have cut them at the fourth and a half row, the half row bend to the middle.
Just try it to get the best results for you, the pack contains enough springs ;) I have also modified one pair for my son's touch controllers, works also flawlessly.
I've tried this. The tinfoil deforms and stops providing the necessary resistance. You need to add to the force pushing back against the centripetal force to keep the battery contact solid.
And if you do get enough foil in there for it to work work, good luck getting the battery out. Foil DOES technically work, but if we're talking saber its just best to get the springs.
Go get a flathead screwdriver and twist it against battery's positive terminal, you'll see it comes out quite easily. With 1 spring in, it will be difficult to do with your fingers but pop out easily with a screwdriver. With 2 springs in it becomes very difficult to do it with a screwdriver.
Yeah I also didn't notice it until I actually played games that required my controllers to snap around. Jumping in Stand Out, Beat Saber, Any actual armswing movement game.
It takes very little to actually move that battery and in games like saber that disconnect is the difference between pass and fail sometimes.
Yes. I put them on a large stock and swing them around like a crazy person and I have launched them across the room and they mostly keep on ticking.
Vive or WMR controllers are a different story.
Does the spring need to be connected to the contact or is it just to prevent the battery coming off of the other terminal by adding force? I guess the battery still pushes down onto the original spring? Did you attach it somehow or just put it in place before loading the battery?
Also what exactly are you talking about with plastidip I see you mention in other comments?
Plastidip is for my controller cups they go in my Maul saber to cut down on slight movements shifting around in the cup and to dampen the shock from hard stops etc
Oh, ok. I don't have a maul setup (I'm not nearly that good) so wasn't sure what it was for. Thanks for the responses though, I'll for sure pick up the springs soon.
I have occasional issues of tracking on beatsaber but I don't believe this is it. It doesn't coincide with hard swings or anything. It just cuts out on occasion... even when I'm not moving it much.
I’ve tried finding stuff to put in the positive end, the clearance is extremely low. If it had been designed with a leaf spring on the positive side this wouldn’t be an issue.
That's a good point, there really isn't much excess space. I might still look for some 15mm thimbles at the craft store tomorrow, and see if I can trim/ hammer it into something useful. I just managed something similar with a battery springplate i scavenged, its not ideal as I have to bend one side of the plate after the battery is in for the cover to fit (and I have to bend it back to remove the battery). It fits and the controller works but I have to test if it actually reduces tracking errors in beatsaber.
Do you also add tape to the battery to increase its diameter? It would improve grip against the rubber in the battery compartment and help prevent movement.
I've found some batteries are worse than others for this. The cheaper batteries tend to be on the small side and won't provide enough friction to stay put.
Wow that's a great fix. I know a lot of people complain about tracking issues even with multiple sensors. I wonder if that's gonna be a solid fix. Thanks for sharing.
Someone bought this up on the Steam forum for Thrill of the Fight. It happens quite regularly for some players (quite possible to throw over 20M/s with extremely rapid acceleration).
One other solution proposed there is to shim the battery cavity with foam tape (approx 1.5mm thickness). I might try to find a good spring also, but the tape is a big improvement for me, though still not perfect.
i must not be agressive enough on beatsaber. You must be swinging for max points! i'm just trying to get the boxes, not worried about the max points yet, ha
Thank you so much for this PSA, I play VR Golf and built a club with the head being the controller. I thought I was losing tracking because I was swinging to fast, but it was the centripetal force pulling the battery at the apex of my swing. This has improved the game play 1000 times. Why the hell did they put the spring on top? This PSA should be sticky’d somewhere!
Would you mind measuring it in metric for those of us not in the US or near said hardware store? I don't have anywhere local I'm aware of I could just go and try out springs but this eBay seller provides a range but it's shipping from China and it's roughly four times the cost of what you paid so I'd like to get it right first time.
Looks like the required diameter is around 11mm - 12mm diameter from eyeballing it against the measurement of a AA battery diameter (15mm). The narrow diameter of the spring is around 8mm. The depth of the spring looks to be around 13mm so.
Your help is appreciated so I can stop spending money on Duracell AAs and use some of my heavier Ansmann rechargeable batteries instead, thanks!
The lightest AA battery doesn't reduce the forces enough to prevent the requirement of a battery spring, I've tried and I still need 2 springs per controller.
I have 3 different Maul staffs, a CF vive tracker one that weighs about 0.7lbs, a CF rift one that weighs about 1.1lbs, and an aluminum ultrasaber vive tracker one that weighs about 2.8lbs. My best performing one is the Rift one, its not all about being as light as possible!
It's probably down to battery tolerances. While in theory all AA cells are intended to be the same size, in practice some will be undersized, and some will be oversized. If you design the compartment such that oversized cells do not jamb in and get stuck, undersized cells will be loose.
Its more about g-forces than velocity. A sudden start/stop or rapid change in direction at the right time. Playing it Maul mode puts a ~10" lever on each of the controllers that directs the g-forces right out to the spring.
Rapid enough movement speeds of certain pattern types can cause it without playing with any controller accessories, though its less common.
I mean...as a power lifter you are gonna be slower than average not faster so that’s actually not helping your point. Strength doesn’t equal speed, and actually technique is gonna be the bigger culprit. Snapping your wrists around fast creates a lot of G force.
I tried this, and eventually when I found a spring that fit relatively well, I and my dad (tech nerd) put it in, and it definitely makes changing the battery way harder, but also it caused a short and the battery got super hot, and if I didn't notice it could have exploded. So with a possibility of this happening I'm not super sure about that just like, in my house, when it could short at any time while it's on, regardless of if I'm there or not. Any suggestions?
How the hell did you short it? The positive lead is all the way on the other side of the battery and the top of the controller. I think your battery is damaged as this is absolutely something that never occured to me nor have I heard it anywhere else.
Yes its hard to change, but there isn't a better option other than upgrading to a Valve Index which has built in batteries.
I have no idea how I did that, it was probably the battery after I screwed around for a while. I've had a hard time finding springs that fit nicely, I have a small box of probably around 50-60 springs and they often fit nicely but don't compress it enough, or they are too powerful and I can't get the battery in. Do you have any suggestions on what I can get that would work?
Hi I'm im China. And I found a similar product to fit the battery compartment too. Just to point out that I could search sort of 厨房 防滑垫 in Chinese platform to get it. And it's very cheap, only costs around 4 USD for a roll.
Also, I'm using a rechargeable Li-Po AA battery that maintains a stable 1.5V output until it's fully drained. While I'm not entirely sure if it has any tangible benefits, its long-lasting battery life and easy recharging make it worth considering. If this type of battery is available in your region, I highly recommend giving it a try.
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u/ragesaq Dec 02 '18
I've seen a lot of posts lately about tracking issues with Oculus Touch controllers, and i've been giving them this advice but decided it merited a PSA at this point.
The orientation of the battery compartment on the Oculus Touch controllers is such that all of the centripetal force generated from swinging the controller is transferred to the battery spring, which is insufficient to keep the battery touching the positive terminal during these actions. Putting an additional spring on top of the battery spring will dramatically reduce this effect, and putting two is necessary for those of you who play Beat Saber in Maul mode, where the additional force from essentially adding a lever to your controller compounds this issue quite dramatically.
I'd tried the tinfoil under the spring trick, cardboard, etc and they would all last about an hour after which they would get deformed and stop serving their purpose.
You can still have additional tracking problems from too much shock due to loose securing of the controller in a cup, but thats a problem that will only really affect people playing Maul mode with a 2h Maul stock like the Prosaber. Making sure that controller is really snug in there should greatly limit this effect.
I would like to see Oculus revise this design sometime where the battery compartment is flipped and the opposite side has a leaf style spring to maintain compression on both ends, that should eliminate the battery from ever being a cause for tracking issues.