Unity Remote 5: Gear VR Controller not detected

Unity Engine
1

Hi,
The script below results in a “No Remote” output to the console when attempting to play a scene using Unity Remote 5 app with the Gear VR Controller using a galaxy s7 with oculus developer mode enabled. The screen works fine and renders the scene. I’m using the trivial scene in the 1.14 utilities package from oculus. This script is attached to a cube which has an empty game object parent with a player flag. It’s similar to a setup script found in this post : How to enable head tracking in Gear VR via Unity Remote 5 on android? - Questions & Answers - Unity Discussions
Is anyone knowledgeable of the Bluetooth joystick feature for unity remote 5? I think the input is not getting passed to the engine… Am I missing an assignment somewhere in the editor?

To verify connectivity, I was able to run Oculus Home and the controller was functional. Transitioning to Remote 5, there is no connectivity. I would like some help answering the following questions:

  • Does oculus handle the controller specifically in it’s own apks or is it available across Samsung/Android?
  • Has anyone successfully used a bluetooth joystick connected to a mobile device (android preferred) that was running Remote 5 to pass controller input into the unity editor?
  • Can someone with a Rift and touch controller verify that the below script functions for them when attempting to play the scene inside of unity editor?

I’ve read that the touch controllers for rift cannot be used independent of the headset since they “communicate wirelessly through the headset”. This really puts mobile developers in a bind when attempting to debug controller settings for GearVR as it requires a build and install on the device.

Original Post

    Using System.Collections;
    Using System.Collections.Generic;
    Using UnityEngine;
 
    Public class TOUCH : Monobehaviour {
 
    Void start () {
        If ( OVRInput.IsControllerConnected(OVRInput.Controller.RTrackedRemote | OVRInput.Controller.LTrackedRemote | OVRInput.Controller.Remote | OVRInput.Controller.RTouch | OVRInput.Controller.LTouch ) {
            Debug.Log ("Remote Detected");
        } else {
             Debug.Log ("No Remote");
             }
        }
    }
2

Your going to come across many hurdles attempting to do this, and I doubt Unity will officially do this for all the competing sdks (daydream, gear vr, etc.) at least not until it’s in a unified Unity API which feels at least a year away.

In my product, in my signature I’m adding emulation of the controller via mouse/keyboard (ctrl click drag reorients the controller and alt click drag reorients the head). I may at some point down the road look into trying to get the hardware to connect via the editor but not sure if that is going to be feasible.

If you’re looking for a more accurate approach without hardware emulation, I’d actually look into how google does it in their daydream sdk. They allow you to install an emulator app on your phone and then use it as a motion controller over wifi. Something like that would be more doable for Gear VR as well but would still take a decent amount of work.

To answer your questions about the oculus sdks, they are fairly locked down on both platforms (rift or gear vr). It does seem like they want to sandbox their environment to only work while in that mode when the runtime is active. On PC that was what made revive necessary to have the oculus runtime up and on android why the controller doesn’t work unless in the oculus home environment or running a gear vr game. Both don’t use normal pairing.