Vive Hand Controller Latency is ~50ms

The office was successfully nerd sniped this week by the arrival of our HTC Vive Developer Edition. We took a break from our OpenVR SDK integration to film the controller movement with a high-speed camera and measure its approximate latency.

That’s our founder Philip wearing the Vive headset and striking the Vive controller on its side a number of times. For each contact, we measured the number of frames between the movement of the actual controller and the movement of the rendered controller.

The average of the ten measurements we took was 11.8 frames. For a recording with 240 frames per second, that means we measured the average latency between the actual controller and the rendered controller to be just below 50ms.

This makes the Vive controller more than twice as fast as comparable input devices like the Razer Hydra and Leap Motion, which we’ve also tested in the same way and found to be in the 100–150 millisecond range.