Drift & Resets
Drift is normal in any inertial tracking system, including SlimeVR. The question is “how often is it bad enough to be noticeable?” — and the answer should be “a yaw reset every ~10 minutes if you’re dancing hard, around an hour or more if you’re walking and socialising.”
If you find yourself resetting every couple of minutes, something deeper is off.
Quick checklist
- Did you full-reset at session start? Stand straight, face forward, trigger full reset. Don’t skip this.
- Is Stay Aligned on? See Stay Aligned. It eliminates most yaw drift automatically.
- Are your body proportions correct? Wrong torso length looks like drift even though it isn’t. Re-check your height in Body Proportions.
- Did you run mounting calibration? Without it, the server is guessing at orientation. Re-run Mounting Calibration.
Common symptoms
”My avatar is facing 10° off”
Trigger a yaw reset. If you have to do this every few minutes, enable Stay Aligned.
”My feet are facing the wrong way” or “Knees bend backward”
Mounting on those trackers is wrong. Re-run Mounting Calibration with the trackers worn correctly (USB ports down, on a spot where muscle movement doesn’t shift them, not on a joint).
”My avatar is leaning forward / hunched”
The hip tracker has shifted or rotated since mounting calibration, or your torso proportions are off. Re-check placement on Wearing Trackers, re-run mounting calibration, then re-check your body proportions.
”One leg is drifting much faster than the other”
A single tracker’s gyro bias may have wandered. Run side calibration on it — two button presses with the tracker resting on a flat surface, wait for the four rapid flashes (see IBIS Overview). If that doesn’t help, swap its body-part assignment with a different tracker (e.g., move the left-thigh tracker to right-thigh). If the drift follows the tracker, that tracker is the problem — reach out via support.
If yaw drift on one tracker persists after side calibration, Preflight’s Gyro Sensitivity page can measure that tracker’s gyro scale error (you spin it a set number of turns on each axis) and write a correction to it.
To work out which tracker is misbehaving without guessing, isolate it with a movement that only that tracker should respond to: lift a knee (upper leg), swing the lower leg (ankle), or tilt a foot. Your hip tracker should not move during any of them.
Infographic by Spazzwan, used with permission.
”Drift gets bad when I do fast turns”
This is normal in inertial tracking. Fast yaw motion accumulates errors. Mitigations: Stay Aligned, more frequent yaw resets, and a stationary moment between turns.
When resets aren’t fixing anything
If you reset, it looks right for a second, then immediately drifts again:
- Trackers shifted on the strap (re-tighten, re-do mounting calibration)
- Wrong body location assignment (swap two trackers — see Assigning Trackers)
- Receiver placement is so bad that a tracker is intermittently disconnecting — see Range & Placement