Virtual Reality Experiences - The Arrival and Setup

I finally did it! I bought myself a HTC Vive! On the 4th of August 2016, I became the proud owner of my very own virtual reality kit...

I was so excited when it arrived during the middle of the day, which was problematic because I still had work to do. However, I soldiered on and once the end of the day rolled around I quickly opened the box... First thing that hit me was the odour; that wonderful new consumer electronics smell, but this was different somehow. Almost like I was smelling the future!

I have to apologise for not providing any photos of the un-boxing process; I was pretty damn excited about the new arrival and I didn't want to waste any time getting the the thing set up! As it turns out, I really needed it... But I'll get onto that in a moment, first here's what's in the box:

• The head-mounted display (HMD).
• A pair of controllers, complete with USB cables and chargers.
• Two base-stations/lighthouses, with wall-mounts, power supplies and a link cable.
• Link box and a power supply.
• HDMI and USB cables.
• In-ear headphones.
• Two cloths for lens cleaning.

I may have missed something, but I think that's the majority of it! Now, onto the details of getting the Vive working!

Initial Setup

So, essentially, the Vive is pretty easy to set up:

1. Set up base stations.
2. Connect the link box to your PC.
3. Connect the HMD to the link box./li>
4. Run the room setup routine.

Because I wasn't sure how the lighthouses would work in my office, I came up with a novel technique for testing their placement: I carefully positioned one on top of the bookcases, the other balanced on a stack of boxes on top of my PC... I'm not usually as precarious as this, and I was extremely paranoid about knocking the base stations over, but I wanted to be sure the whole system worked before I went ahead and drilled holes in the wall!

The next step was to connect the link box to my PC. Fortunately for me, my 970 has just enough ports for me to connect the HDMI cable; the two DVI ports and single DisplayPort are each connected to a monitor already. With the display connected, I plugged in the USB cable, powered up the box and connected the HMD and watched all the various drivers install.

Error 108

So, at this point, I'm practically sick with excitement. I fire up SteamVR to set up my play space and...

Error 108: Headset not found

Huh. No matter, I thought, I'll just try to fire up SteamVR again. Error 108. Shit. This wasn't good. So, I started Googling around and I found out that error 108 could be related to driver problems or worse, a DOA headset. However, I was fairly certain I didn't have a broken HMD as the PC had recognised the new device; all the drivers installed when I first connected it, and I could also see an "HTC Vive" entry in my device list:

So, after some further research, I found a few tips that might help:

• Rebooting the headset.
• Completely disconnecting everything and reconnecting.
• Trying another USB port.
• Removing all the USB drivers related to the Vive and starting the whole installation process again.

I tried all of the above suggestions, none of which worked, but the troubleshooting process introduced me to a sweet little application called USBDeview. This allowed me to see was all the USB devices that had ever been connected to my PC and I used this application to forcibly remove all the USB drivers that had been installed recently.

A quick aside: have you ever noticed how Windows will see a new device each time you connect it to a different USB port? Over the years, I've ended up with a Razer Megalodon, Razer Megalodon-2, Razer Megalodon-3, Razer Megalodon-4 and even a Razer-Megalodon-5 listed as my audio device... Using USBDeview, I was able to see all the instances of this device and remove them all; this was a completely unnecessary step in fixing my Vive, but it allowed me to fix this particular bugbear of mine!

After several hours of tearing my hair out and it drawing late in the evening, I was ready to throw in the towel and (shudder), raise a support ticket, until I found one last suggestion... Executing Steam with the "Run as administrator" option. Now, I had tried running Steam in my admin account, as opposed to using my regular "limited" account, but I hadn't tried this. Sure enough, when I used this option and launched SteamVR, my headset was detected! I can't tell you how elated I was to see the SteamVR application finish loading and show all the connected devices:

Room-Scale?

With the Vive finally working I quickly got to setting up my space. There are two options here:

• Room-Scale - this is the ideal option. You have the ability to literally walk about in the play space and certain titles require it (e.g. Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption). In order for this to work, you need a minimum of 1.5m x 2m of space available.
• Standing Only - if you have less than the minimum space, you can configure the Vive in this mode. Some titles will work fine with this setup (e.g. The Lab), especially if they're seated experiences (e.g. Elite: Dangerous).

I thought I'd be able to get away with a room-scale setup in our office, but it turned out I was wrong... It was standing room only for me, which was frustrating because two of the games I'd received as part of the Vive bundle required a room-scale setup; Fantastic Contraption and Job Simulator. However, despite the disappointment, I kicked off the tutorial to get myself acquainted with the system.

I had heard how accurately the Vive's controllers were tracked, but I almost couldn't believe how easily I was able to pick up the pair of them as they hung suspended in the air of the Aperture Science testing chamber (they were on the office desk)! After being introduced to the system by a helpful Core I spent a good few minutes messing with the different mechanics available to me. To be honest, I was blown away by even this "simple" demonstration. The sense of scale in the testing chamber was amazing, and I found myself giggling like a school-child at my ability to inflate different colour balloons, bat them away and zap them with a laser! I had to share the experience with my wife immediately, and she too was soon enjoying herself by creating colourful balloons and sending them drifting away from herself.

The thing we both agreed on was how impressive the sense of scale was "inside" the Vive... After both of us took the HMD off, we experienced a powerful feeling of disorientation; similar to the sensation of waking from a particularly vivid dream. What I've found interesting, is that over the past month or so since I've been using the Vive, I think this sensation has lessened. After particularly long sessions, there's a slight feeling of detachment, but I think my brain has become more used to being transported "between worlds". After the successful test run with the tutorial software, I fired up Valve's The Lab and tried out a couple of the activities available there; the archery scenario was particularly fun! However, by this time, it had gotten very late, so I packed up for the evening, with a plan to return to the world of VR as soon as possible!

Post Upgrade Woes - Part 2: Spontaneous Reboots

After running into an initially scary but simple to fix problem following the recent(ish) GPU upgrade I performed, the PC was subjected to it's usual routine as the house work-horse; a bit of web-browsing, photo editing/curating, primary school teacher planning and resource creation, and plenty of gaming! In fact, the machine was subjected to some fairly lengthy Skyrim sessions post-upgrade; check out some of my screen caps for an idea of how amazing it looked!

Over the course of a Saturday, the machine had been left idling; both my own account and that of my fiancée were logged in, with her account the currently visible session. I happened to notice that the PC was displaying the Windows Welcome/Log in screen, neither of our accounts displaying the "currently logged in" message, which was strange. Remembering the previous issue and fearing a spontaneous reboot, I checked the Windows Event Viewer.

As I had feared, the machine had experienced a BSOD and rebooted, however, this time with a different error than before:

---

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000124 (0x0000000000000000, 0xfffffa8004d90038, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\Minidump\032512-15288-01.dmp. Report Id: 032512-15288-01.

---

What I found particularly concerning was that despite having configured Windows to not reboot automatically following a BSOD. A brief search online only compounded my fears of a hardware issue. Some possible causes given were:

• Possible memory issues.
• Power issues - either incorrectly configured voltages or instabilities in the supply.
• Overheating.
• Pretty much any piece of hardware in the system(!)

To rule out a problem with the system's RAM and CPU, I immediately decided to perform an extended run of MemTest86+, followed by Prime95's small fast Fourier Transform torture test; both ran for several hours without any problems. So, I dug further into the Event Viewer and found a message that revealed a bit more info:

---

A fatal hardware error has occurred.

Component: AMD Northbridge
Error Source: Machine Check Exception
Error Type: HyperTransport Watchdog Timeout Error
Processor ID: 0

---

The HyperTransport bus has been used in AMD CPU design since the introduction of the AMD64 architecture, and replaces the old Front-Side Bus used previously. It provides a channel, separate from the memory bus, for the CPU to carry out I/O operations on the various other pieces of hardware that make up a modern PC, in particular, those on the PCI, AGP or PCIe buses (there's a great explanation of the HyperTransport bus over on Hardware Secrets for those interested). Since I had just upgraded my graphics card, my first thought was that there was in fact an issue with the GPU itself.

To try and confirm my suspicions, I opened the minidump file referenced in the system events and performed some basic analysis. This proved fruitless, however, because it seems that because the system was rebooting despite being configured to halt and perform a full crash dump, instead producing "minidumps". This meant that there was never enough information present in the dump for the Windows debugger tool to narrow the problem down to a particular driver.

I contacted the supplier, Overclockers.co.uk, mentioning the issue and they immediately issued an RMA. Because I hadn't really performed any troubleshooting myself and because the card was making mince-meat of most of the games I was throwing at it, I loathed the thought of simply returning it. Fortunately, Overclockers support team pointed out that I could take as much time as I wanted to try and diagnose the problem, my RMA would still be valid.

This offer proved to be most fortunate, as my attempts to replicate the issue were mostly unsuccessful. The problem did reoccur, but I was seemingly unable to create a situation where I was certain the BSOD would be triggered and indicate the root cause. Over several weeks, I made several re-adjustments to my system to try and isolate the problem:

• Reset the BIOS settings to their defaults.
• To completely ensure there were no outstanding driver issues (the previously mentioned problem was caused by such a conflict), I performed a fresh re-install of Windows.
• Switched the Corsair VX550W PSU back to the Enermax NoiseTaker EG701AX-VE W previously installed. Despite this not fixing the issue, I left he older supply installed after I used an online tool to check the suitability of the Corsair PSU against my current system spec. Choosing to allow for 10 USB devices and a small amount of overclocking headroom, the results suggested I would need a PSU capable of outputting 581W. Even adjusting the calculator for only 4 USB devices, the suggested PSU was 560W, still more than the 550W Corsair model could output.

None of these changes resolved the issue and so I decided to ship the GPU back to Overclockers; I had run out of troubleshooting options and I wanted their opinion on the GPU's stability. Even if they found no problem with the GPU, I would have the piece of mind that someone with a superior testing suite could confirm the card to be OK. I provided them with the troubleshooting steps I had undertaken and the following observations about the problem:

• The issue only occurred when the system was idling, or at the most playing music.
• There was no guarantee that leaving the system idle for any length of time would result in a reboot. In attempting to replicate the problem, I did not shut down or reboot the machine for over week and could not trigger a BSOD.
• No matter how hard I pushed the system, whether in-game or using stress testing/benchmarking tools like FurMark and Unigine, the machine never rebooted or exhibited any strange behaviour of any kind.

After just a couple of days, I received the following response from the Overclockers team:

"Graphics card passes all Tests with no issues, Tests Run: Crysis WarHead, 3D Mark 11, Furmark, 3Dmark Vantage, AVP, Lost Planet 2, Stone Benchmark MSI Kombuster, Resident Evil Benchmark, ATI Mecha, ATI Ladybug, Streetfighter Benchmark, Stone Giant and heaven benchmark tool, these were all tested at 1920 x 1200 resolution running maximum settings, tested on DX9, DX10 and DX11 where applicable"

They were unable to find a fault the card when under load, which was to be expected. While this wasn't the problem I had been experiencing, I didn't expect them to spend weeks waiting for a BSOD to occur! Even if they had gone to such length, I honestly doubt they would have seen the issue occur; I suspect the problem is quite specific to my system's configuration.

Since my card was returned to me and it's been re-installed into my system, the issue hasn't re-surfaced. I'm hoping that the act of re-seating the card may have been enough to resolve the issue, but it's more likely that the particular condition that caused the reboot hasn't arisen yet. I have my fingers crossed for the former, however!

Post Upgrade Woes - Part 1: Display Corruption

As mentioned in my previous post, following my GPU upgrade, I experienced some odd behaviour. Strangely enough, the computer worked perfectly directly after the upgrade; I was even able to jump into a game of Skyrim (and be wowed with the massive increase in performance, I might add). However, when I logged into another account, strange artifacts appeared on screen, the screen flickered off and back on and, finally, the whole rig spontaneously rebooted!

Extremely worried there was an issue with the card, I logged back into my account; no artifacts appeared and I was able to run FurMark for an extended period without any problems. However, logging out and back into the secondary account immediately resulted in the same problem. After the machine rebooted again, I tried logging in as the "Admin" account I have configured; same problem. This time I was able to see a message briefly pop up on screen, which I later tracked down in the Event Viewer:

"Display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

Researching online brought up a host of reasons why this message might appear, but considering the issue only occurred in certain user accounts, I was fairly certain that some remnants of the previous card's drivers were causing the issue, and that running the driver installation in my user account had not cleared up other accounts on the system. To test my theory, I booted into safe mode, logged into the "Admin" account and used the msconfig tool to stop the AMD/ATI Catalyst Control Centre from starting when logging in. Sure enough, I was able to reboot and log into the "Admin" account with no problems at all.

After a bit more reading around I discovered a tool named "Driver Sweeper" that some people claimed to have helped them with similar problems. I'm very sceptical about installing any sort of 3rd party utilities on my machine; usually they don't uninstall properly, don't work, or you get more than you bargained for (i.e. ad/mal/spy-ware)! However, given the number of times the tool was referenced on forums, I decided to give it a go.

Once Driver Sweeper was installed, I executed a scan for video drivers and it located several files that I hadn't been aware of and even the installation files that are extracted to C:\ATI! After clearing away all the driver remnants, I rebooted and performed a fresh install of the AMD catalyst drivers in the "Admin" account, before rebooting and testing that I could log into each of the three accounts on the system without issue. This test proved successful, with no re-occurrence of the artifacts or rebooting, and I was safe to use the system normally again!