we encounter a strange problem with the Gear VR using S7 phones.
As all Gear VR applications, the experiences allows the user to turn his head. In our use case, someone is lying slightly sidewards, not moving the head at all.
A couple of customers reported that they had to adjust their head position slightly over time because the view was shifting (slightly rotating over time).
Has anyone observed this? Any idea what this could be? We’ve tested this internally and couldn’t reproduce it.
This is normal for any mobile VR setup (Gear VR is much more stable than daydream). If you spend anytime in any of the video players (oculus video, pigasus, netflix, etc.) You’ll notice that the movie screen usually will slowly drift. Over the course of a 2 hour movie the screen will almost never be in the same position as where it started. If you hold the back button which brings up your profile, you’ll notice a reorient button which will allow you to recenter (drift is always most on the yaw axis based on how the sensors work).
If you wanted to experiment with ways to combat this in game and reproduce this I’d either leave the game on for a long time or you can usually coax it to happen sooner if you either tank the framerate (like max out the cpu or have background apps doing a lot running) that usually makes it drift much faster.
5 minutes seems a bit quick, but if your game encourages the player to look around quickly it’s possible. Usually, you can get longer than that as long as your game is consistently getting 60fps and the framerate isn’t dropping at parts.
If the player pausing reorienting isn’t an option you could certainly try gently over several frames coaxing it back towards the center when you know the player has drifted (like if you know the head should go between -90 degreees and 90 degrees on yaw and you start getting 110 degrees very slowly rotate the body to compensate for the drift you’ve detected.