Phone compass and Turning
BodyWalkVR - v1.56 → v1.66
Walking and body tracking gain a phone compass that keeps your heading straight, plus several fixes. The built-in FlatVR tab also got a big update this cycle - see the FlatVR notes for the full list.
Phone compass, so your heading stops drifting
• A compass on the phone dial. When your phone is the tracker, the FlatVR/phone panel now shows a real compass: a fixed needle over a rotating N/E/S/W ring, with the azimuth and quadrant in the middle, exactly like the compass app on the phone. It reads the phone's own magnetic heading, filtered by the OS.
• Heading correction follows that compass. Turned on, it holds your in-game facing to magnetic north instead of letting it creep as you play. It corrects the way you actually point the phone, so it stays right whether the phone is lying flat or standing up.
• One switch, off by default. It only helps where the phone's magnetometer is trustworthy, so you choose when to use it; the magnetometer is turned on in the phone app.
Fixes
• Turning is fixed. Turning driven by your body could go the wrong way and wind past a half-turn (a "Turn +544" in the dial), and with Turn set to None the hips lagged backwards behind your head instead of following it. Turning now tracks you correctly. Quick Setup also stopped overwriting the axis you picked for a phone, nRF or SlimeVR source - it presets only the headset rows now.
• The DIY Magnetic Treadmill no longer fights the headset. Choosing Magnetic Treadmill on the Steps tab used to leave a headset walking source selected at the same time, so the two drove movement in parallel. Picking the treadmill is now exclusive, the way the other locomotion sources are.
• Meta Quest Pro: finger-touch on the controller works in OpenXR. On Quest Pro (and other Touch controllers), the capacitive touch sensors - your finger resting on the thumbrest, or on the A/B/X/Y buttons - were dead in OpenXR games: the layer declared the fields but never filled them, so a binding set to one of them did nothing. They reach the Mapping tab now. This needs the updated OpenXR plugin (2.0) - install it again from the Plugins tab.
• The app version is shown in the window title, so "which build do I have" reads at a glance, and the installer now removes older stray installs instead of leaving two side by side.
• Silent crashes can be caught. For the crashes that "just close" the app before a report can be written, the Debug tab now asks Windows to save a dump (and switches on Page Heap to catch memory corruption), then reports it with one Send.
The FlatVR tab
The flat-to-3D tab inside BodyWalkVR received its own large update this cycle:
• Cinema Mode plays films smoothly - no more freeze-then-jump.
• Sharper, faster depth - the AI presets were measured and two broken ones replaced, a new Balanced preset was added, and the model can now run in pieces for a steadier frame rate.
• Direct3D 12 games fixed - real depth from games like Cyberpunk 2077 no longer arrives blocky or resets the driver.
• Smoother output - dark gradients no longer band on SBS/XREAL, and glasses that switch their own 3D mode keep the picture on the right half of the screen.
• A round of crash fixes from your reports.
Full detail is in the FlatVR update notes.
Rolling back: Steam library → right-click BodyWalkVR → Properties → Betas → last_stable. Your settings are kept either way.
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