Valve has some new thoughts on what’s “humanly possible” in SteamVR

The kind of Beat Saber levels that require hand movements that were once considered superhuman by SteamVR developers.

Over the years, Valve has made dozens of changes to the system-level software behind SteamVR. Most of them aren't inherently interesting if you're not a VR developer. Then there's the latest update, which Valve says was prompted by a change in the "limits of what we thought was humanly possible for controller motion."

After looking at "tracking data from Beat Saber experts," Valve says it had to increase the theoretical limits for how quickly a human can move in VR. In the comments, Valve developer Ben Jackson details how top-level Beat Saber players were sometimes overwhelming the "internal sanity checks" that make sure SteamVR's lighthouse tracking system is working correctly.

"One of these checks relates to how fast we thought it was physically possible for someone to turn their wrist," Jackson writes. "It turns out that a properly motivated human using a light-enough controller could go faster (3,600 degrees/sec!) than we thought."

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