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Oculus Rift S guide: Fixing tracking problems and blackouts

The Oculus Rift S was released this week. However, some owners are experiencing tracking problems and other USB related issues such as blackouts.

The Rift S uses five onboard cameras for tracking. While some preprocessing seems to be done on the headset, the Rift S still pushes USB 3.0 to the limits. USB 3.0 is a widely used standard, but not all USB 3.0 controllers properly support it. This means that some motherboards may have issues.

If you’re having tracking issues such as the headset or controllers freezing in place, or you’re experiencing periodic “blackouts”, try one of these five potential solutions. We recommend trying them in order, as we’ve ordered them from the least time & effort required to the most.

Turn off USB power management

Windows has a feature which cuts power to USB ports it doesn’t think are being used. The problem is, sometimes this triggers a false positive and shuts down the USB port your VR headset is using.

To find the overall setting for this, search for ‘Edit power plan’ in the Start menu. When it opens, click ‘Change advanced power settings’:

Now expand USB Settings and turn off USB Selective Suspend:

Next you’ll need to disallow Windows from turning off the Rift S specifically. Right click the Start button and click ‘Device Manager’. Expand ‘Universal Serial Bus controllers’ and right click each instance of ‘Rift S USB Hub’ then open Properties.

In the Power Management tab, uncheck ‘Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power’:

You should also do this for all Hubs with ‘3.0’ or ‘SuperSpeed’ in the name, such as ‘Fresco Logic USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller’.

Try every USB port

Almost all motherboards have more than one USB controller. Different USB ports on it may be connected to different USB controllers.

The easiest way to find out which USB controller will work is to simply try plugging the Rift S into every USB port and seeing which has issues and which doesn’t. Strangely, one user had success with plugging it into USB 2.0 for around 30 seconds and then back into USB 3.0.

You may want to take a picture with your phone each time you change the port to more easily remember which ones you’ve already tried.

Note that you should also disconnect and reconnect the DisplayPort cable every time you switch USB port.

Reseat the cable

While it may seem hard to believe, some issues are just caused by the cable being loose. This can be either on the PC end or the headset end.

On the headset end you need to detach the facial interface to access the cable.

Make sure to disconnect the cable for five seconds before plugging it back in. This should also be done on the PC end, and here the USB port should be plugged in for five seconds before the DisplayPort.

Repair the Oculus software

Some tracking issues are actually caused by a corrupt install of the Oculus software. This can be solved with a repair.

  1. Go to oculus.com/setup
  2. Click ‘Download Oculus Rift Software’ then run the downloaded file
  3. Click Repair

Don’t worry, your Rift games and save data should be unaffected.

Still having issues?

If you’re still having issues, your best bet is to create a detailed ticket with Oculus Support, including your Rift logs. Oculus has a forum post explaining how to collect these logs here.

This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com. Copyright 2019

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