Six releases in one post. Walking gained a new input device and a clearer view of what it is doing; the FlatVR tab - watching a flat screen in 3D inside the headset, which ships as part of BodyWalkVR - got most of the rest.
DIY Magnetic Treadmill
A manual treadmill can now drive walking directly. Put a magnet on the roller and a reed switch or Hall sensor beside it, wire it to an Arduino, and BodyWalkVR reads the pulses over the COM port.
It arrives as a plugin, so Magnetic Treadmill appears in the Locomotion Setup list once the plugin is installed. Everything downstream is the machinery you already know - Intensity, Deadzone, Inertia, Speed 100% and the speed curve all behave exactly as they do for the mouse treadmill. The only thing that changed is where the signal comes from.
The settings panel shows the raw sensor value and the pulse rate live, so you can see the sensor working before you put the headset on. Quick Setup offers it next to the optical mouse and sets up the COM port on the spot.
Steps and Direction show the speed curve
The curve now sits beside the live graph, so you can watch the dot on the curve against the signal that drives it. The controls did not move; only the picture did.
A smaller install, with every depth model available
BodyWalkVR used to carry three depth models and could never reach the other six - and the ones it left out were simply invisible. All nine are in the list now, and the ones you do not have carry a small arrow: pick one and it tells you what it weighs and offers to fetch it. Nothing needs restarting, and every download is checked against the size and checksum the server publishes before it is accepted.
The installer is about 96 MB smaller as a result. Anything you fetch is removed when you uninstall.
The FlatVR tab
One slider for depth: Cinema and Game. Pick a mode and the app loads a depth model, measures what it actually costs on your card, and settles on the heaviest one that fits - Cinema for the sharpest picture at 30 FPS, Game for the lowest delay at 60. Custom still leaves every setting exactly where you put it.
IPD is capped at your headset's real IPD. Past the distance between your own eyes an image cannot be fused at all, and the slider used to let you go there. A stray nudge can no longer ruin the picture.
ReShade setup is a list, not a file browser. Pick your game from a menu and the depth add-on is placed for you - no more hunting for the .exe.
Profiles: walking and graphics, kept apart
The Profiles tab now has two lists. Walking is what it always was. Graphics (FlatVR) saves the look of the picture and nothing else - save several and switch between them, publish one to the cloud, or load somebody else's. Only the picture settings travel; local paths, your monitor and the screen placement stay on your PC.
There is also one game search for the whole app now, instead of a second, worse one living in the profiles tab.
Health and safety notice
Shown once on first launch and available from the settings afterwards, in all 16 languages.
Test Room 1.07
Follows the app's language - change it in the app and the room changes with it. Valve controllers work again.
Fixes
Hands are no longer treated as controllers. With the controllers out of your hands, a stray tracking reading could still press buttons or shove the screen around.
Axis mapping did nothing on FlatVR and OpenXR sources. The dropdowns wrote to one set of settings and the movement code read another, so the choice went nowhere. One place decides now.
Turn output ignored the stick side. Head turning always came out of the left stick on the SteamVR driver, whatever the Turn tab said. Fixed in the app and in the SteamVR Hook plugin, now 2.1 - with the older plugin everything keeps working as before.
Crash when the SteamVR session ended. The app kept asking about its dashboard overlay after SteamVR had gone, and died on the next frame.
The plugin list could come back empty. One empty field in the server's answer was read as "you have no plugins".
BodyWalkVR started on a depth model it did not have. A new installation selected a model that was never part of the package, so depth quietly did nothing until you went and picked another one.
Capture diagnostics reported a limitation that no longer exists. On laptops with two graphics chips it gave up with a message that stopped being true in 1.44. It now measures through the same path the app uses.
Screen Glow and Background work on XR glasses again. Neither effect was switching on there.
The background no longer shows through the picture in patches.
FlatVR is no longer offered as an engine while it is switched off.
Crash reports now carry the app's own log and the build they came from - which is how two reports from different machines turned into the SteamVR fix above. Nothing is still ever sent unless you press Send.
Rolling Back
Right-click BodyWalkVR in your Steam library → Properties → Betas.
Pick last_stable to go back to the previous release at any time. Your settings are kept either way.