If you’ve seen Beat Saber, you know it could theoretically get very hectic. Beats are flying at you at ridiculous speeds and hitting every single one would really require some intense physical workouts. In fact, it gets so fast and furious that VR headsets like the Vive can’t even keep up with how quickly you need to move because Valve thought they capped it at the limitations of human movement.
Turns out they were wrong!
In an update to the Steam Vive software today, Valve posted a small tidbit about an improvement to the lighthouses which track movement for the game’s motion controllers.
“Increase limits of what we thought was humanly possible for controller motion based on tracking data from Beat Saber experts,” the bullet point reads.
As a Valve engineer explains in the comments, essentially the software was glitching because people were moving so fast for Beat Saber songs that it thought something must have been messing up. It’s like when someone uses a scouter to read a power level and it’s really high so the scouter-user just assumes it’s broken, except with math.
“The tracking system has internal sanity checks to identify when things go wrong,” the comment reads. “For example, if our math says you are *behind* your only basestation, clearly we made a mistake, because we wouldn’t be getting any signal from behind the basestation. One of these checks relates to how fast we thought it was physically possible for someone to turn their wrist. It turns out that a properly motivated human using a light enough controller could go faster (3600 degrees/sec!) than we thought.”
Your VR headset might be training you to be a superhero, but make sure to use your powers for good. You can read our review of the PlayStation VR version of Beat Saber right here.