tl;dr:I've had a Quest 2 for almost 3 years. I received my Quest 3 today and was very excited to use it. Controller tracking performance is much worse than the Quest 2, at least in the context of games where you swing your arms as fast as you can. This was not a problem for the Quest 2 (unless controllers were physically damaged, e.g., hitting a wall, dropping them, etc.). Don't buy if you play games like Gorilla Tag!!!
Question: Are there ways to modify the Quest 3's controller tracking such that fast hand movements won't be affected by the prediction-like behavior where the in-game hand moves farther than you swing? When I perform a baseball throwing movement with my hand/arm, the tracking will not keep up and it ends up losing my hand's position for a fraction of a second, causing my in-game hand to be positioned farther away than my hand actually is (this is not an issue with Quest 2 controller tracking).
Details/Context: I primarily use VR for exercise, and I mostly play Gorilla Tag. Gorilla Tag is a game where you play as the upper half of a gorilla, using your arms as your means of locomotion. Basically, you use your arms as if they were your legs, and you can run, climb trees, wall-run, etc. It's an infection-based tagging game where you join a lobby of up to 9 other people, and the game will randomly select a player to be the first tagger. The tagger(s) will continue tagging until everyone in the lobby has been tagged (infection-style), and then a random player will be selected as first tagger; this pattern just continuously repeats.
While the learning curve is pretty steep to play at a high level, there is a growing community of players who are very competitive (approx. 10-20k players based on the communities I participate in - Competitive Gorilla Tag on Discord and Gorilla Tag Competitive on Discord). As a prominent member of this community, people have been seeking my feedback on whether or not the Quest 3 is worth it. While I feel that a majority of the new features are amazing, I have had issues with the controller tracking.
Gorilla Tag is an active game where you're constantly swinging your arms as fast as you can to travel around the map(s) to avoid being tagged. The primary player base for the game is Quest 2 users. Aside from physical damage, most players have not had any problems with controller tracking on the Quest 2, aside from when the controller goes out of the tracking range of the headset (as expected).
However, the Quest 3 controllers lose tracking during medium-fast to fast hand movement (medium-fast: like playing catch with a friend; fast: throwing a baseball as hard as you can). The consequence of this in the context of Gorilla Tag is that your in-game arm extends to the game's max arm length frequently, causing your hand to collide with the wall/tree/ground and launch you away from the surface. This is a big issue for games/activities involving fast-paced hand movement as it's not nearly as reliable as the Quest 2 controller tracking performance.
Ok - finally got back to this. Yes, turned off all hand tracking and... problem 98% resolved. I played through a few beat saber songs - hard then expert (e.g., Another One Bites the Dust) and tracking was only lost once. It was bad when it happened - long enough to trigger to be kicked out of the song - but only once and that's compared to about 10 times per song before I quit restarting it when hand tracking was enabled. Good enough that I wont' return it.
it turned out to be hand tracking in the end i had to completely shut down the system and then try the game. i suppose this is a helpful fix but shouldn't be considered a solution. also i have noticed there is definitely a tracking issue when you swing the controller aggressively.. Meta should build an app that reports diagnostics on how accurate tracking is..
I am so glad I found this thread! I was having weird issues yesterday with really basic swings in Beat Saber and some stuttering during songs. Doing a swing upwards vertically from my hip to above my head and sometimes the saber wouldn't even move in game. Just a T-shirt, ceiling light is on etc.
I didn't fully disable hand tracking, I just went to settings and toggled "Auto switch from Controllers to hands" to off and turn Auto-Switch sensitivity to low just for good measure and it seems to have sorted out both my issues. The songs no longer have little pauses like the quest is trying to calculate something and pretty much all of my swings are tracked and registered by the device!
Just speculating but I'm mostly convinced it's to do with the auto switching and there must be some swings that make the quest 3 think that I've put the controller down for a second. Not the most perfect tracking but also good enough for me to play casually.
@TheAntiSocializer any update regarding a potential 'fix' or at least further acknowledgment that the issue is being worked on ? Thread was marked 'Solved' a month ago and clearly things are anything but solved. Discussions in each of the above mentioned app keep on going, people are returning their Quest 3 and prefer their Quest 2 because of this tracking issue.. it's not a minor glitch.
Hey @astralmind!, thanks for checking in. I went ahead and got with the team but wasn't able to get too much information. They are still looking into this and trying to find a solution but I don't really have much more of an update to provide at the moment.
As soon as I get something else, I'll happily post it in here for everyone.
One of the most ridiculous threads to read through. Beat saber players using a grip that covers all the LEDs and then complaining about tracking???
People using wrongly designed quest adaptors where the LED face is obscured and then complaining about tracking, only to try a different (correctly designed) adaptor and not have issues.
Quest 3 tracking is good and anyone saying otherwise for their use case should have known what they were buying.
