Gyroscope is operating weirdly

Unity Engine
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1

I am trying to program a game in which you tilt your phone and the character leans in that direction, but I can’t seem to get the gyroscope to work properly, before when I held my phone upright it was only slightly off, but now when I hold my phone upright it is off even worse. I don’t understand what’s going on. Can anyone help?

2

First make sure your phone actually supports gyroscope properly. Some phones don’t.

Go find a gyro tutorial, something that just reads and prints values, and see if that actually works.

Once you have that proved out, then you know the problem is in your code.

To track it down, you must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

  • the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
  • the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
  • the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

  • is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
  • what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
  • are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

You can also put in Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target.

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:

3

But that’s just it, I have been printing the values, and the values aren’t consistent, before the gyroscope attitude y value (which is what I’m using) would print .1 when my phone was upright, then later it started printing .8 when my phone was upright. I don’t know what’s going on. And yes I can confirm my phone supports gyro. It is a Samsung Galaxy A50.

4

just adding note that if you use mobile XR plugin (with GoogleVR), gyroscope control is perfect…
would be really interesting to those how to use that same code, without unityXR/gvr…

while ago i tested every mobile gyro script that i could find online,
none of them worked nicely (too much drift, or otherwise inaccurate)

Only thing that came close enough to usable, was to add filtering to gyro values…
but still unityXR/gvr gyro is hundreds times more stable.

and havent yet tested those paid gyro control plugins from asset store though.