It’s been a wild two months for the Oculus Rift S, which launched in May and had a few rather annoying bugs that users had to deal with. Oculus has been extremely responsive to customers complaining about problems though and has, at this point, successfully mitigated all major issues that were the cause of software glitches or some other related problem. The last of which is well known to anyone who has used an Oculus Rift S for more than a few minutes at a time; the white screen flashing glitch.
Described as a “glitch in the Matrix” by some, the screen on the Oculus Rift S would occasionally flash white and look “glitchy” for a split second, repeating this process every so often. This would happen every 30 minutes or so, but was seemingly random. Oculus’ official response was that it was being addressed and only affected a certain subset of users, but the outcry on the forums seemed to suggest it was a much more far-reaching issue. Personally, I didn’t notice the white flash until it was pointed out by other forum users because it happened so quickly and infrequently that I attributed it to a tracking issue.
As of firmware 1.39.1, a hotfix that was just released today, the white flash glitch is officially dead and gone.
As with any firmware update, when you boot up your computer and start up the Oculus Store, it will inform you that a firmware update is available for your headset. This download is quick and should only take a minute or two to install, getting you on your way to enjoying the latest songs in Beat Saber in no time.
Oculus stated just 11 days ago that it was working on a fix for the white screen flash, and that promised update was moved from the Public Test Channel (PTC, also known as beta) to the final channel and available to all users who have an Oculus Rift attached to their computers.
Firmware 1.39 has been an amazing delivery from the Oculus team at Facebook, as it has single-handedly fixed nearly all issues with the headset in one fell swoop.
The first of which was the massive improvement to tracking on the Rift S, which was problematic at launch and didn’t allow users to get their hands too close to the headset without serious movement glitches. The new 5-camera “inside-out tracking” system that the Rift S uses took a bit of tweaking, but it’s now on par with the accuracy and speed of tracking that users expect from a modern VR system with motion controllers.
Oculus had also worked fixes into the previous firmware update for the audio level issues that were present at launch, as well as video quality issues that were present on computers that ran Nvidia Turing GPUs.
As with the previous firmware update, Oculus recommends that folks still running Windows 7 or 8 should upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as possible. Windows 7 and 8 support is about to end and headsets will most likely not work on these systems, going forward.