The most enjoyable aspect of the Gear VR in our household is currently the Cinema app. Unfortunately there is a drift effect, requiring a manual reset via the home menu.
A typical film requires about 20 breaks from immersion to reset the orientation as the drift begins to grate by the five minute mark. With a rock-steady head (!) the drift is still in play. It can be characterised as a CCW rotation, resulting in the virtual cinema screen slowly slipping off the left hand visual range.
Question : Can this drift be frozen, or can a quicker re-orientation hotkey be implemented?
Vertical Horizon ...
A 'nice to have' relates to viewing media generally. The Gear VR is asymmetrically heavy and not conducive to longer experiences. Resting your head on a pillow is a way around this - good for watching movies. This inevitably turns your VR view to the ceiling however.
The void cinema lets you reorient easier with a tap on the touch pad (while looking off screen, holding the touchpad lets you pinpoint the reorientation). Not sure what i do differently but when i'm in the Oculus Theater i can watch around 20-30 minutes without any drift, then it starts aswell (but autocorrects itself after some looking around?). Sometimes it starts already after like 5 minutes, but most of the time it starts only after 25 minutes.
Said it in other threads aswell: The longest things I ever tried had been 2 Episodes of a comedy TV series of 20 minutes each. Both watched in void mode with screen on the cyling (me laying down on the sofa, resting the head in a pillow)
I did not experience the slightest drift during those. In all the other cinemas I only tried stuff like music videos of a few minutes lengh.
I recall someone said, its atm impossible to do anything against this drift effect.... but I wonder why it seems to differently strong (I did not experience any drift in 20 minutes while another person said, after 20 minutes the screen was "out of view"....)
"Fanty" wrote: I recall someone said, its atm impossible to do anything against this drift effect....
From an end user perspective there is nothing one can do to eliminate drift.
App developers have it in their power to workaround it by using the compass reading to prevent drift. Oculus could also fix it at driver level with this method:
The Note4 compass gives a stable absolute yaw value, this can be mixed into the realtime rotation yaw with very low gain to eliminate the drift which is only a very slow (but very annoying) creep.
Forget about the compass having too low latency or it's signal being too low resolution, it doesn't matter as it will not be contributing to the general head tracking, only used as a reference.
"fella1" wrote: The void theater is currently the only cinema theater that lets you watch movies while lying down.
Cool, void's the fastest to reorient view when drifting, you just tilt your head 90deg left, tap to reorient, then look straight back up in your comfort position, tap to reorient, done. You can get away without pausing like this.
Yes, just clocked 1hr with no drift in my preferred cinema.
I changed rooms (in my physical house) and who knows ... different EMF levels? RF? Radiation from Betelgeuse? (This room is slightly further away from Betelgeuse). Compass reorienting on the Note?
When everything aligns the Gear feels pretty amazing.
When it doesn't, it feels very much the preview of what could be, circa 2016.
Games like Bombsquad can be near impossible to play at times due to this since the playfield is always drifting. While a swivel chair allows me to adapt, it doesn't fix the core issue. Now that we are finally seeing some content rolling out, drift is becoming more and more of an issue.
