Beat Saber Made Facebook Changing Oculus Quest Controllers

New information posted by Facebook tracing the path between Oculus Rift and Quest 2 describes how Beat Saber improved the quality of Oculus Touch tracking.

Facebook goes so far as to suggest ‘Beat Saber saved the quest’ as an in-depth company blog post quotes a number of employees as explaining how the rhythm slicing game has changed the course of its development program autonomous.

Beat Saber has sold over four million copies, making it possibly the best-selling VR game of all time. The game began development in 2016 and released in Early Access on Steam in May 2018. Facebook released the original Oculus Quest in May 2019 with Beat Saber as one of its launch titles and, six months later, Facebook acquired the developers.

“Quest would have failed without Beat Saber,” said Sean Liu, product manager, hardware.

Beat Saber Made Facebook Changing Oculus Quest Controllers

Ján Ilavský, Head of Development for Beat Games, reportedly said, “I had a quest in my closet for about six months, and I haven’t opened it.”

Ilavský describes Facebook as “patient” while Facebook’s director of content ecosystem Chris Pruett adds:

A guy by the name of Trevor Dasch on the team I was leading at the time did the initial portage. This is not what was delivered, but it convinced the Beat Games team to port on Quest. Either way, once we got Beat Saber on Quest, we realized the tracking needed some work. The tracking seemed pretty good until you tried to play Beat Saber on Expert + difficulty, and if you were good enough at playing Expert + you would find that even though you have the skill you can’t get the score.

According to Pruett, Facebook “invented” a KPI for the monitoring team “based on the Beat Saber score” and machine perception architect Oskar Linde reportedly said he measured a g-force of 30 g with a inertial measurement unit when playing Beat Saber.

“The IMU we had in the system at the time was capped at 16g. We had to go in and change the IMU as a result of Beat Saber, ”Linde said.

Head of Software Programs, Insight Anna Kozminski added, “We had to find all kinds of methods to predict where someone’s arms are when we don’t see them, and then when they come back in sight, make sure that it seems transparent. ”

Finally, Jenny Spurlock, engineering director of Facebook’s Input Explorations, reportedly said, “I started doing a statistical benchmark where I played songs in Beat Saber and recorded the data and looked at the gap between Rift S and Quest to see what was going on. I noticed that the gap between the Rift and the Rift S was small and the gap between the Rift and the Quest was really big. We ended up using this method to identify the problem. It was huge. Without Beat Saber, we probably wouldn’t have known or been able to determine what was going on.