The owl came back

On 30 September we wrote that sending the hips had cured "the owl": you turn to look behind you, and on your friend's screen your whole body turns with your head. It had not cured it, and this time there are numbers.

What we measured

For one session on 17 October, both games noted three directions every thirty seconds: the one the mod sends for the copy, the one the headset faces, and the one the body faces, taken as the line between the thighs. That gave 56 windows of thirty seconds across the two games.

The direction the mod sends is the headset's, in every window, within a degree or two. The body is somewhere else: 7 to 35 degrees off on average, and up to 172. And in the windows where a player stood still and looked around, all of the turning came while the body did not move at all: 371 degrees out of 371 in one, 329 out of 329 in another.

So when you stand still and look over your shoulder, your friend sees your hips and legs swing round with your head.

Why the hips did not fix it

The hips tell VRIK where your pelvis is. They do not tell the game which way your character faces, and the game turns the whole character with the headset. The hips were right. The character they belonged to kept turning under them.

What comes next

Send the way the body faces as the character's direction, and the head relative to that. It is being built now. The walk has to come along with it, because in VR the way you walk and the way you look are two different things.

Also in the build we are testing, not yet seen for real: your head now nods and looks up and down on your friend's screen, instead of staying level.