i’ve managed to write at least one post for this site every month for 2 years, which i feel is impressive for my standards since my interest in things usually goes after about a month only to reappear months later for a similar amount of time. in a small celebration of this i’ll let you all know about some things i’m working on in the background as i did last year.
first is a post about the recent downtime the server experienced. what caused that was that i was performing some upgrades to it and said upgrades took a lot longer than i expected which despite that i simultaneously expect for these kinds of things. it’s all working great now though and the server is a lot more capable than it was. i’ll hopefully be talking more about the specifics of it some time soon.
next is something i do recall talking about in the past which is that i wish to start making write-ups on every vr headset i own. right now my collection is quite small at only two (a third turning up tomorrow) but as time goes on i’m sure that number will increase so long as my interest in vr stays which i’m pretty confident it will. said write-ups will contain the expected info like the headset’s resolution, fov, tracking quality, and comfort. in addition to that i’ll also be talking about the modifications you can do to get a bit more out of them as well as an analysis of how well the headsets run popular vr software/games on an older machine i’ll build out of my last computer once i’m done upgrading the one i’m typing this on, which i understand will likely exclude newer high res headsets but i don’t plan on focusing on those myself due to their generally high price and my interest being more towards getting the most out of older stuff as i’m sure is evident from what i talk about here. and as promised at some point i’ll get to testing steamvr performance with the 2.0 ui vs the 1.0 ui as i’m still using the old ui due to its better performance on my machine.
(i promise i’ll edit this to be a direct link to the mp4 instead soon)
so this month’s been a lot of vr. lighthouse 2.0 finally, my full body tracking is back, and i get to add more to my steamvr ecosystem experience, both the hardware and the software.
so, lighthouse 2 first. it was easy to replace the base stations themselves and i used the cables that came with the new ones instead of the existing ones because the amount of vive base station power plugs that have magically broken earth prongs is actually insane. (i have 2 of them myself!) i’d later thank myself for this when i rearranged the cables in my room and realised that the new ones are a lot longer. updating was a funny thing. for some reason versions of steamvr that are any newer than 1 year (some claim 2 but i bought my index controllers in late 2024 and they could update fine so not in my experience at least) are completely unable to update hardware. you press the update button, it says it’s closing applications, it closes itself and dies. you could downgrade steamvr using the betas tab at the time to get past that issue so i did (if you’re attempting this now though, you’ll soon realise valve have removed every option from there except from beta and previous. try going through these steps instead). the first one updated fine, as for the second one i think the link box was too far away because the update failed. the update dialog told me to power cycle the base station and so i did while thinking to myself that surely powering off a device that’s updating is dangerous. either way it updated fine after that.
with these new lighthouses i’m going to try power managing them in another way. i used to keep my old lighthouse 1s on all the time as many people have suggested over the years and i ended up with 2 of them failing on me. the power indicator would stay green but it would be clear that it’s not tracking, either through a load of tracking errors or steamvr just telling me that they couldn’t see each other. now instead i’ll be turning them on with the lighthouse power management app on android a few minutes before i go into vr and putting them to sleep mode at the same time that i go to sleep. i will update if/when one of them die.
now, the full body tracking. the 3.0 vive trackers went back on sale and so i bought 2 more of those. while setting them up i decided to take the watchman dongle i already had in my computer and put it into a usb 2 port, then plugged the new ones into my front panel usb 2.0 ports. somehow this fixed an issue i had when i was using my old original vive as a watchman where i’d have to reboot windows (sometimes multiple times) to get all the devices to show up. dunno why that fixed it but i’m not complaining. use usb 2 for your watchmans i suppose. the vive trackers seem a lot more capable of calibrating well and keeping that calibration too so i’m happy with that purchase.
and of course, as is expected at some point for anyone who opts into the steamvr hardware ecosystem, valve index component failure. for a lot of people the index controllers are the only good vr controllers we have and i do agree with the fact that they are so amazing (they’re the most comfortable controllers i’ve held) but god do they love randomly dying for no reason. i was laying down in vrchat the other night and suddenly i notice my thumb presence acting up. i open the controller tester and the thumbstick presence sensor is detecting touches that aren’t happening. at some point it just stops functioning and so i restart steamvr and that fixes it for a while. next day though and the thumbstick presence no longer functions. as well as that i’ve noticed that vibrations are now louder on my left controller than my right. thankfully though so far that’s all it is. i’m not gonna bother messaging steam support unless something worse happens to them.
edits
(2025-10-07: i wrote “an” instead of “a” somewhere, well done me)
so if you didn’t know, i’m pretty big into vr. quite the enthusiast i’d say. i unfortunately don’t have like a big collection of vr shit for now but i am trying to save up and what i do have has really given me quite a positive experience with the technology. to give some context because i don’t talk about vr nearly enough here, i started off with the original vive in late 2021 as the main thing i was looking for in a headset was a cheap entry point into the steamvr ecosystem. i really enjoyed using it and believe that if you have no experience in vr it’s a really solid way to start if your main priority is the same as mine, especially now that you can find them for ridiculously cheap prices (in the UK often just over £150 for a full kit). when i decided that it was time for a new headset, i found a used vive pro for around £190 and a wireless adapter kit for around £150. my experience with that was equally as amazing. the same deep blacks and generally more vibrant colours i had come to expect when in vr, screen door effect noticeably reduced, and a headstrap that is so much better than anything htc made for the original.
a big downside of the vive though was of course the controllers. not for the reason you’d expect though surprisingly. at this point i had never experienced any controllers other than the wands, apart from using a friend’s quest 2 for a short amount of time. i really enjoyed using the touchpads (to the point that even today with the index controllers i make great use of theirs), and the click on the triggers felt great to me too. the problem i had with them funnily enough, was build quality. for as much as i loved the wands’ touchpads, they were built like shit and i had to buy 4 replacements over the time i was using them because of how often they would fail. this left me with a lot of wands sitting around doing nothing so i ended up following a guide online to convert 2 of them into trackers and stuck them onto an old pair of shoes. i was originally planning to buy a vive 3.0 tracker in order to get tracking of my hip/waist for proper full body tracking but due to the fact that i had bought a link box and tether for my vive pro i no longer had any way to power the original vive to use it for its built in watchman dongles so instead i bought the gear vr lens mod (and looking back at it i’m happy i did because not long after that purchase the 3.0 vive tracker went on sale lol). it was about £40 for the lens mod itself and a handheld manual air blower to blow out any dust that entered the headset when i took the lenses off.
fast forward a few days, everything arrived and i popped off the vive pro’s original lenses by pushing a small flat-head screwdriver in between the lens and the casing and then prying up. they got stored separately in plastic bags then i dusted the screens inside the headset and pushed in the new lenses. when i started up the headset and opened vrchat i was fairly amazed by how much cleaner things seemed now. the sweet spot felt much bigger, glare/god rays were noticeably reduced, the rings you could see through the old lenses due to the way they’re made were no longer visible, and things were generally a lot less blurry. the screen door effect i do believe is a little more noticeable but i don’t really mind it, weirdly enough i’ve been known to quite like the look of the vive pro’s screen door effect in some cases. after testing i then put the headset away for a bit and went to do other things.
later i put it back on and upon entering my vrchat home world i immediately noticed something was off. the world’s skybox distorted a lot when i moved my head and the main menu looked like it was bulging forward. in an attempt to fix this i shut down the headset and used the lighthouse console accessible in SteamVR’s program files to write the v14 config found here to the headset. after doing that the skybox distortion became a lot less noticeable. it was definitely still there but not at all in an amount that annoyed me personally. now, the menu’s distortion. after a bit of searching i found out that adjusting my headset’s ipd should fix it, which it indeed did. a few weeks in i noticed what i thought was a set of stuck pixels in the bottom left of my vision in one eye. i paid no attention to it for that day while simultaneously worrying that the green screen that shows up in vr when your computer’s locked might have caused some pixels in my headset to go stuck. later on i thought that maybe it might have been some dust stuck in the headset so the next day i took that lens off and dusted the screen again. that fixed it.
now that it’s been a month since i first installed the mod, i can say i quite like it. its not perfect at all, the lenses that were chosen for the original vive (and presumably by extension the vive pro because they seem to use the same ones) were chosen for a reason and by installing this mod you will be introducing distortion to the optics of your headset, distortion that in the worst case could end in you becoming very motion sick without even realising it (to quote the comment i linked a little bit up above, “Most concerning is that swimmy HMDs cause nausea at an almost subconscious level, you don’t need to perceive it for it to make your experience using the HMD unpleasant.”). in my experience though i’ve felt none of that, even after the fixes i still notice distortion but for me personally it’s not at all an issue. people claim as well that by installing this mod you will lose a small amount of fov, i never noticed this either myself which could be to do with the fact that i use the original vive’s facial interface on the headset which does push my eyes closer to the lenses. my apologies if you just so happened to find this post while deciding whether or not to install the mod but your mileage will absolutely vary when installing it and i feel that’s a really important thing to let you know. for a bit more of a definitive answer on whether or not you should do it though, do consider it if you’ve been using vr for a good while, know that you have a good tolerance to anything that causes motion sickness in vr and don’t at all mind taking a risk.
… has always been kind of a mess for me. it’s not really surprising since i started out with an i7 4770k (that i still use) and an rx 570 4gb then upgraded to an rx 6600 but ever since around the release of steamvr 2.0 i’ve been noticing performance degradation that i never noticed before. display errors/purple frames all the time, constant slowdowns in the steamvr system menu, unplayable amounts of stuttering in beat saber, hell it was allocating all of my ram at one point for no reason specifically when i was using my original vive to play specifically beat saber and never any other headset or game. funnily enough that happening does indeed cause everything on my machine to crash and reset but thankfully that one seems to be fixed now at least. only the other day i tried accessing my steam account management inside of vr to add money to my wallet and it caused my entire frame graph to go purple.
i decided to play beat saber yesterday and surprisingly it was working well enough that i could stream it to a friend group i’m in with fairly minimal stuttering. that experience caused me to look a bit further into what’s causing my performance issues…
much like many other developers on steam, valve allow you to download older versions of much of their software by opening the betas tab of said software. under steamvr’s beta tab are many different options. two for the macos build, the actual beta itself of course, an option that allows you to go back to the previous version, and a few older windows builds. as of right now one that’s just labelled “Temporary branch […] (for testing)” and the one I decided to install, “oculus_win7and8”, version 1.15.12, which exists primarily from my understanding to allow windows 7/8 users who need to use an old version of the oculus software to still be able to use steamvr to some extent. today i’m using it to prove a point, it would seem.
so i install it and unsurprisingly half of my overlays don’t launch. the reason for this ends up being a pretty important issue later on so i won’t spoil my fix for that. in the meantime i just downgrade all the ones that have a downgrade in their betas tab and disable the ones that don’t. i open beat saber and immediately the game no longer stutters in a way that makes it completely unplayable. i set some of the best plays i’ve set ever, including my actual personal best scoresaber play as of the day i wrote this, and feel really happy that i’m actually able to play the game again. additionally somewhere in the process it turned down the intensity of the controller vibration in game which ended up being really nice for me, i tend to switch between having them on and off and the subtleness of the vibrations now are actually a great middle ground between on and off. and even better, now opening the account management page on steam doesn’t cause my graph to go purple! it just opens in the steam client itself instead of the big picture mode web browser in vr.
quite quickly into this i realise that staying on an old version of steamvr isn’t really going to be sustainable. vrchat is completely unable to launch in vr mode when you’re running a version of steamvr this out of date and i assume many other games share the same issue. this is the pretty important issue from earlier! and here’s the fix.
the old ui still exists in steamvr, you can access it if you close the steam client in vr. i assume it falls back to the old ui when steam is closed because all the features of the new ui wouldn’t work without steam open. but either way it’s still there which is a good thing in my eyes. this means that you’re still able to use it as your main interface, even with steam open, because it still exists in basically its entirety. choice, we love it! and surprisingly enough the way to change it is an official thing, you just need to add a line to steamvr.vrsettings (located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\config\). under the block of text labelled “dashboard”, add the line “allowVRGamepadUI” : false, including the quotation marks. make sure that everything is still comma separated and that the option at the end of the block doesn’t have a comma at the end of it, save the file, then start steamvr.
a picture of my steamvr.vrsettings “dashboard” section, for visual reference.
congrats. you should notice that you’re now back to the old ui, with a bit of a steamvr 2.0 twist. if you’re running a machine as underpowered as mine, your first thought might be “let’s open vrchat and see what the performance is like now!”. so, as a result of the fact that i am indeed running a machine as underpowered as mine, i opened vrchat and basically all of my purple frames are gone and my performance has increased in some cases. for example my most definitely very feature-rich home world used to run around 70 fps. it now runs considerably closer to 90. as another example, my framerate in Cozy Cottage is still sub-30. but in my case the purple frames are gone and that’s what matters to me really. if you’re getting purple frames you’re getting constant really strong and noticeable, almost sickening stuttering along with a mad amount of compression if you’re using any wireless solution no matter what your framerate is. despite my main issue being with the purple frames however, this does seem to just be a universal performance boost. games are more stable now, the less intensive of them now getting closer to actually reaching their framerate targets.
i am going to continue testing this. i’ll record some frame graphs of me playing various games with the new ui enabled and disabled, and i’ll post them in a page along with an analysis of the data right here to share with you all.
edit: between the time that i wrote this and now, i have received a vive pro link box and tether cable in the post that i’ve been using for about a week. using that has significantly upped my performance too, to the point that i now am getting considerable increases in my framerate everywhere, with the obvious trade-off being that i no longer feel as free while standing up in vr. (although i must say i remember being tethered on my old vive as a lot worse than what i’m experiencing with the pro. maybe there’s some sort of difference in how the cables feel on a pulley? i never upgraded from the triple tether cable on the original vive so…) i will also be testing the performance of the new ui enabled vs disabled using the tether to see if it makes any noticeable difference if you’re not using a wireless solution.
