The SteamVR Update on October 4th changed the default behavior for Vive Trackers, and it is causing some confusion. We want to address that confusion and explain what's going on with trackers.
The primary reason we made this change was to significantly increase the number of titles that support Vive Trackers. Before SteamVR Input there were three major styles of tracker support in SteamVR Games:
- Games which use trackers in addition to controllers for user body tracking. VR Chat and Island 359 are two examples of this kind of game.
- Games which have custom support to use tracker peripherals like the Hyperkin Blaster to act as controllers. Arizona Sunshine and Duck Season are two examples of this kind of game.
- Games which have no explicit tracker support at all. This is most SteamVR games.
SteamVR Input added the ability to configure a tracker as "held in hand", which makes the tracker act as a controller. It also added default bindings for those controllers that work in many games in category 3 (and the ability to rebind inputs for many more games.)
What happened in the October 4th update is that the default changed from being best for games of type 1 to being best for games of type 2 and 3.
Users are able to change their own trackers to use the old behavior via the tracker management UI. If you mostly use your trackers for VR Chat or other games in category 1, you should consider doing that. The tracker management UI is available on in-headset dashboard in the settings UI. Just click the "Manage Vive Trackers" button and change any trackers to "Disabled". That will opt the tracker out of the new SteamVR Input system and allow applications to find them as the GenericTracker tracked device class.
Because of this change, any user with a Hyperkin Blaster or other controller peripheral that provides buttons can use their trackers with many more games. Just leave one of your controllers off and turn on the tracker instead. It will be selected as the left or right hand, and by default it will be bound to the trigger, trackpad click, grip, and application menu buttons. For many applications those buttons will work unmodified. For others, someone will need to customize the bindings to suit that game, which they can then share with everyone else via the Steam Workshop.
We continue to work on Vive Tracker support and the rest of SteamVR Input. If you have any feedback about how any of this works, we would love to hear from you in the comments below this post, or in the SteamVR discussion forums.