wrote:
Did you try cooling the front of the headset (by fan or ice pack) as many of us in this thread have suggested? Since I put a fan in front of my racing rig, I have played dozens of hours (2 hours at a time) of Project Cars with not a single problem. Without the fan, the grey screens started after 20-40 minutes.
You could also try covering a sensor on the front as many have suggested. However, this may only buy you a little longer time until you have to cover another (overheating?) sensor.
Kimmora Thank you for your suggestion you are correct about it being a heat problem. Here is what I found:
The problem is absolutely heat related. So here is my evidence. First I live in Philadelphia which starts getting hot in April and May which coincided with the first grey outs. The room I use the VIVE in is poorly air conditioned and gets hot during the summer. Second the problem begins after the unit has heated up. Say 20 to 30 minutes of gameplay. Third I was making another attempt to eliminated all other possibilities, drivers, versions of software, versions of firmware, sync cables, usb cables, etc, and saw some improvement this first week of October. Why? Because it’s cool in Philadelphia in October and my room needed no A/C. But what cinched for me happened today. I received a call while playing a game with the VIVE. I paused the game and put the headset face down on the couch and spoke on the phone for 20 minutes. When I came back and started playing I had grey outs galore. I touched the face plate and it was warmer than usual but not by much. I had inadvertently left Goggles sitting on its face so the heat was trapped by the fabric of the couch. Again it was not superhot just slightly warmer than it had been when I was wearing it earlier. To confirm the diagnoses I ran to my freezer grabbed frozen gel pack and applied it to the front of the goggles. The grey outs went away in seconds. Further the grey outs stayed away even with the gel pack removed. (I mention that because others have deliberately block sensors to get to VIVE to work. I wasn’t blocking sensors just cooling them.) This is more than correlation it is causation. This is a defect and it is repeatable.
I am going to contact VIVE as I would like my headset replaced. A hot room shouldn’t break an $800 computer. Good luck to everyone who has this problem I hope you can get it fixed.
John
PS If this is a double post please forgive. I had to edit a spelling and the post seemed to disapear.