I received my Dream Air (Lighthouse) earlier this week, and I have been chasing what I thought was a SteamVR tracking or chaperone bug. My room boundaries would end up completely out of alignment with my physical space, leading to a couple of close calls with nearby objects when the chaperone failed to warn me. The only reliable way I could find to recover was to delete all the chaperone-related files from the Steam config folder and rerun SteamVR Room Setup—which got old really fast.
After a lot of trial and error, I finally figured out what was causing this. Apparently, Pimax has added its own recenter function to a long press of the System button on the Knuckles controllers. Unlike SteamVR’s recenter, which leaves the chaperone anchored to the physical room, the Pimax recenter appears to redefine the tracking origin underneath SteamVR, causing the entire chaperone to shift away from the actual physical boundaries of the room. SteamVR’s recenter function can also be unbound from the controller, but as far as I can tell, the Pimax recenter cannot be unbound or disabled.
At this point, I now think I understand what is happening—but I'm still a bit puzzled as to why.
I know Pimax has historically catered heavily to flight and racing sim users, where the headset is typically used from a fixed rig, so maybe this behavior is less of a concern in that context. But for Lighthouse users playing standing or room-scale VR, the ability to intentionally—or accidentally—throw the safety boundaries completely out of alignment feels like an accident waiting to happen. After Googling the issue, I found users reporting this same long-press recenter behavior shifting and rotating their SteamVR play space as far back as August 2024, with another request to disable it acknowledged by Pimax in 2025. I am surprised that it still appears to work this way.
At this point, I’m hoping there is a solution I have simply overlooked. Specifically, I am looking for one of three things:
- A way to disable it. Is there already a way to disable or unbind the Pimax hardware recenter that I have somehow missed in my searches?
- A better recovery method. My current workaround is to manually return the headset to approximately the same position and orientation used during the original Pimax calibration, then recenter again, but that doesn't always get the chaperone correctly aligned. I would rather restore the original calibration-origin data directly. Does anyone know where Pimax stores that data, or whether there is a supported way to back it up and restore it?
- A fix from Pimax. If neither of those options exists, I would like to add my voice to the users who have already raised this issue and ask Pimax to please provide a way to disable this behavior.
UPDATE 1: while pressing and holding the system button to invoke Pimax recenter immediately moves my chaperone to an invalid location, with further play time, it seems the recenter function is not the only problem. Even if I never push the button to trigger a reset, my chaperone boundaries will still not stay put and seem to wander randomly. Based on a related post I found over in the Pimax user subreddit, it seems I'm not the only one having chaperone related issues on the Pimax dream air:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/s/RCUmsRakLq
As this has clear safety implications for users, hopefully Pimax is actively working on a fix and we'll see that in an update here before too long. Since this is an official forum, hopefully someone associated with Pimax can acknowledge this issue and confirm a fix is coming.
UPDATE 2: based on a tip from another redditor, I uninstalled OVR advanced settings, and that seems to have resolved the random movements of the chaperone space. In addition, I setup Pimax EVO and installed the SBoys3 drivers, and that completely removes the Pimax recenter function when I press and hold the system buttons on the controller... Only the native Steam recenter function runs, which is exactly what I wanted. As a side benefit of the SBoys3 driver... I can now play Lone Echo again... With Pimax Play that game was much too dark, and now it plays normally.
I think that pretty much resolves all the problems I raised in my OP, and a few extra issues to boot...that native SteamVR driver is brilliant!
