Got the Razer Hydra. What am I doing wrong?

I can't use mine anywhere near my big steel shelf I use as a desk... perhaps relocate?

If you're not already, try the sixsense motion creator driver instead of the razer driver, I found it was much more consistent after I switched.

Other than that, be careful of metal in your interaction space, its a magnetic tracker, so metal (or getting too close to the base) can cause strange warps in the field that the controller expects to read.

I haven't had any issues (other than basic ones, like having it in motion controller mode when trying to use it as a gamepad, and then wondering why it didn't work), and a few issues with buttons doing weird things and me getting the calibration wrong, with odd effects. - Also, the default button mapping for using it as a mouse has caused me to mute my sound more than a few times...

Having said that I seem to have a pretty clean environment magnetically speaking... When using it as a mouse it's pretty sensitive, admittedly (but it responds to rotation, not linear motion), and it takes a bit of getting used to...
But not to the extent that it's unusable.

I did install the sixsense drivers pretty quickly though, because I wanted to actually configure stuff...

Anyway, I can't say what's going wrong, but it sounds like something specific to your setup, because despite all it's quirks it usually works really well...

I got it working decently now. With the tron demo I missed the readme that had a specific profile I had to use. I also tried the sixense tuscany demo and it seemed to work fine. I''s still quite hard to use. I don't know if I need practice or is it just alot easier to use with the rift.

I'm thinking it takes practice.

You can sort of move it around as though it's a real pair of hands, but not quite. - The tuscany demo in particular is quite glitchy.

And from playing around with it, I found there's really no feedback as to whether you're close enough to something to grab it or not. - The hydra has no kind of physical feedback, and they didn't implement any real visual feedback either to tell you what, if anything you might be able to pick up.

I've heard it said that the depth perception you get with a rift makes it easier to judge where the hands are. Which makes sense.

I guess that's a game design issue though; - I've seen a lot of games highlight objects you can use if you press an action key for the very reason that you otherwise have to guess what will happen.

Despite it's age, the hydra has seen very little actual use in games, so I guess it's still in the realms where developers haven't completely thought through all the implications of it yet.

I played around the Tuscany demo some more and it's getting a bit easier. I tried the demo with 3 monitors in 5760 x 1080 resolution and the added field of view did help a bit. I noticed a few problems with the demo where a rift would help alot.

Throwing things with good aim was hard because when I'm looking upward with an analog stick my brain is kinda telling me that I'm looking forward so I could not aim in the right direction. This is probably something that is a bigger issue for people who play alot of videogames and are used to throwing objects in the direction where the camera is pointing. VR immersion would probably make aiming alot easier.

Another thing I found difficult was turning my head naturally where my hands where and simply tracking things I throw in the air. This would definitely be way easier with head tracking.

3rd problem would be the glitchiness of the demo itself like you mentioned. Throwing things is kinda weird. When I throw something with alot of force it sometimes flies great distances and other times falls flat in front of me.

I agree that depth perception would also help, but I didn't have major problems evaluating where my hands were in 3D space.

The glitches in that demo are pretty extreme.

It doesn't detract from it being interesting, but it is very noticable at times.

The worst one is that sometimes, objects would essentially vanish if I grabbed them. (Especially if I tried to do so with two hands).

I assume they fly off with some insane speed, but the effect of it is more like they just pop out of existence.

You can open and close the shutters, and the chest on the second level, but that too is pretty glitchy owing to the way they're attached.

Finally, I'm a little constrained for physical space in my current setup, but when I throw an object using either an overhand or underhand toss like you would expect to do with a real object when throwing it, the trajectory is nothing like what you would expect it to be...

throwing things in a manner that I would expect would result in an upward arc of about 40 degrees or more, instead usually resulted either in the object dropping almost straight down near my feet, or flying a short distance in a mostly downward direction, and in almost a straight line...

Clearly though, that's more of a fault with the physics simulation than the hydra. There's no reason why the hydra couldn't match the kind of things that Wii Sports Resort was doing, and the Wii Motionplus controllers can't even track linear position to any real extent...

I think the hydra still lacks any properly implemented demos in that regard...