Techniques for VR controller input smoothing

Question

I work on a zero gravity space VR game where player can hold to an object and rotate around it using their hand. Imagine spacewalk on ISS, grabbing a handle with your extended hand and trying to move yourself around, including rotation.

When player grabs the object and moves hand/rotates wrist, I calculate where their body should move and apply transformations.

My issue is with jerkiness of controller input. It's just not smooth and doesn't feel very nice. Raw controller input has no lag, but high frequency and low amplitude jitter.

So far I tried slerp and 1Euro filter, but in both cases if jitter was reduced, I couldn't manage to reduce lag to an acceptable level.

What adds to complexity is that I need to smooth out both position and rotation and if any of them lags more than the other, movement is off.

I wonder if there are any other solutions I could look into?

I'm using Godot 4

Answer 1

Lag and smoothness are competing goals in the real-time 3D input context.

You must choose one over the other.

Either it is at the VR location, or it getting there over time.

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When player grabs the object and moves hand/rotates wrist, I calculate where their body should move and apply transformations. My issue is with jerkiness of controller input. It's just not smooth and doesn't feel very nice. Raw controller input has no lag, but high frequency and low amplitude jitter.

Any signal filtering will add input delay.

The answer is to limit/restrict the "hand/rotates wrist" input to reasonably small adjustment values within the given game constraints.

In space, slow and steady is the name of the game. Moving too fast in zero G has consequences...

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