I've installed the Controller Emulator APK on my phone, and connected via USB to my computer. USB Debugging is enabled. In my Unity scene I have the GVRController prefab, and it's set to USB mode. The Controller Emulator app is open When I hit play in the editor, there's a log message that it's trying to connect to 127.0.0.1:7003 (localhost for some reason) even though my Controller Emulator is showing a real IP address on the phone's screen. It gets a connection refused for localhost:7003 and gives up. What else am I missing in the setup to make this work?
As another error message in the Unity log told me, I needed to add adb to my PATH environment variable. After doing that it connects (although the gyroscope seems to be inverted from when I use the real Daydream controller...)
I had the same issue, you have to add the adb.exe file path as a system variable in PATH. Just noticed you posted that you fixed the issue, hopefully my image will guide other in the future.