Has anyone gotten a controller to work on Hololens/Unity yet?

I have a project with a bluetooth game controller that works fine on my dev computer. It pairs fine with the hololens, but registers nothing when the project is running on Hololens.

Anyone have any luck on this matter yet?

 

Hey Wesley,

Yeah, I have tried with it and without

 

Should that work?? Oh how I have tried. The Xbox One controller is not bluetooth. They do have one coming out at the end of August that adds bluetooth connectivity to what it currently uses. I have both a PS4 and Gamicon bluetooth game controller. Both of which do pair with the device but do not work once the app is deployed to the Hololens.

There is a thread on the Hololens dev community forums of someone that got a controller to work in a non-unity app.

The project I am trying to get it working on, is a simple sphere in a spatial map at the moment. I wanted to get a controller working before I dive too deep into that project.

 

The new controller coming next month for the XBOX S is supposed to have Bluetooth support. It's my understanding that it will show up under Windows as a standard controller, but it's not clear if this will work day 1 with the HoloLens or if any kind of driver will need to be made available over there. This is something I'm looking into myself. I will check back here with you guys as I make progress. Please do the same as you have a chance to mess with it and share your findings.

 

hey eXntrc, how are you on the old forums?

 

I didn't know there were new forums. Where should I be going now? I just had this one bookmarked in my browser.

 

@eXntrc yeah, I mentioned that the Xbox One S controller could potentially work, but that wait till Aug 31st is a bit bad for progress. But I have other bluetooth controllers that still do not work, and from what I gather no one has been able to get one working. I think it is the reason Brekel made his tool to stream a controller connect to the Hololens.

 

The problem with using a classic Bluetooth controller like the Moga Pro is that you have to connect it via Bluetooth as an HID device, then you have to process the HID events. I have C++ code to do this and I was working on converting it to C# and wrapping it in Unity, but when I realized the new controllers should theoretically just show up as regular controllers and work with the existing APIs I chose to put that project on hold.

So, are these forums still the right place to chat about Unity and HoloLens for now (other than the MS forums obviously)?

 

Yeah @eXntrc this should be fine. This thread is over in the new forums system, but I am guessing they are having some issues with the new forum. I just did not realize that this forum system was even still in existance

 

the PS4 shows up as a wireless controller, while the Matricom shows up as a bluetooth gamepad. I have wondered why the distinction between the 2 products

 

@Tautvydas-Zilys I have HID selected for my projects, bluetooth gamepads still have not worked for me. After reading this I went a opened a few of my project just to make sure and HID is selected in all of them.
My question to you is, have you seen a controller work with a Hololens ? I don't strictly mean from a development standpoint.

I can not even play minecraft on Hololens with a controller.

 

you know, it has with a wired controller. I will try it with the bluetooth controller and see..

 

well it appears that the UWP app running on my PC, much like the hololens, does not recognize the bluetooth controller(BC) as well. BC works inside unity. On the other hand a wired xbox360 controller works fine inside UWP.

 

@Tautvydas-Zilys

The other controller, matricom gpad-bx, same story, it works fine in unity and does not work in the compiled UWP app(I also tested both of them with Windows 10 minecraft). Between 1. bluetooth controllers, 2. trying to use Unity Networking for something other than a real time FPS, and 3. the debugger no longer working with VS update 3/HTP b22or b24, I am being really slowed down to almost an absolute stop. Very frustrating.

On an aside, someone needs to come up with a tutorial for Unity Networking that is not an exact copy of the tutorial you have released. Trying to make something that is not a real-time first person shooter feels like an impossible task for someone that has never done network coding before(and maybe it should).

 

yeah it is enabled unfortunately

 

@Tautvydas-Zilys any idea when the guy that implemented this will be back?

 

Hey @Tomas1856

Thanks for joining the conversation, I hope your vacation was awesome! I just had one myself a few weeks ago.


This is the first of 2 controllers that I have been trying to get to work with Hololens and UWP

 

And here is the other. Both work fine in Unity, and in the windows calibration setup but do not react at all in uwp applications. Hololens or otherwise.

 

@Tomas1856

Thanks for handling the problem, I look forward to getting progress in this area.

 

@Tomas1856 Does this mean ALL bluetooth controllers will be supported? I purchased a steelseries StatusXL yesterday that pairs with Hololens but does not work.

I've been following this thread on the official Microsoft Hololens forums:

http://forums.hololens.com/discussion/634/anybody-got-a-gamepad-connected-to-hololens-yet

In that thread, someone else tried and failed with the steelseries, among other controllers. But it sounds like this will all be resolved from your fix, correct?

 

@Tomas1856 Looks like 0005 and 0001. Sweet!

 

Is there a HTP build of Unity that includes these fixes? If so what's the minimum version that supports it? If not, what version can we expect it to show up in?

Thanks so much Tomas!

 

The fix has landed in 5.3 and is in queue for 5.4. HoloLens is pulling from 5.4 line so this will propagate into the next release which happens after this lands in 5.4 . Thanks for your patience!

 

I've been seeing some YouTube videos up showing that the Xbox S controller is working (somewhat). I tried my SteelSeries and it doesn't however.

Is Unity currently only supporting the Xbox S controller for the Hololens? Or am I doing something wrong on my end?

 

FYI: We got a Wireless Xbox One S controller to pair to the HoloLens and work on the latest Unity HTPs, but initially we were missing input from the right stick, the triggers, and some of the buttons. After wrapping some of the gaming APIs, we were able to get input from ALL sticks and buttons. We put a free asset on the Unity Asset Store to accomplish this:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/70068

 

That's great, jam! Thanks!

I'd still like to get confirmation from the Unity team whether other controllers will be supported or is this an Xbox One S monopoly.

 

Nothing works no matter what I try. I've ordered an Xbox One S controller to compare. Will let you what I find. Hoping it's just something on my end.

 

I got the Steelseries Stratus working but the values returned querying the axis do not correspond with a range from -1 to +1. Some of them return -1 on the resting position and others return +1. Has anyone found this?

 

I also got mine to work. I needed to re-pair my Stratus XL and it worked. (Ugh!)

 

Did you get the right values for every axis? From -1 to +1?

 

Has anyone had any luck getting input from an Xbox One S controller paired to a HoloLens via Bluetooth? I have a demo that works successfully within the Unity editor with that same Bluetooth controller, and it also works when I run the UWP build directly on my Windows 10 PC.

On the HoloLens side, my Xbox One S controller is successfully paired to my HoloLens and I can confirm that the HoloLens receives input within the Settings page or the Xbox app. That said, the controller doesn’t seem to work within my Unity demo on the HoloLens.

I am running Unity 5.5.0b6 and it was my understanding that based on this thread here that it would be fixed by now. Has anyone had any luck getting controller input working in a Unity app on HoloLens using the default Unity Input settings? (i.e. without wrapping any UWP-only code to map the controller).

 

Controller support into the HoloToolkit-Unity is currently being reviewed.

https://github.com/Microsoft/HoloToolkit-Unity/pull/205

 

With Unity 5.5.0f3 (64-bit) on HoloLens, I'm also observing that every axis comes in as -1 (or if the axis is inverted, +1) no matter what. All the buttons work fine, though.

Interestingly enough, if I run the Universal Windows App on my laptop running Windows 10 with the same Xbox Wireless Controller connected over Bluetooth, the axes work fine, so it seems to be something HoloLens-specific rather than UWP-specific. My laptop's registry says I'm running 14393.447.amd64fre.rs1_release_inmarket.161102-0100.

 

For now, I'll use https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/70068 (thanks, @jam429 !!!) to work around it, but I'd love to see a fix, soon, so I can get rid of all this special-case code.

 

Is the Xbox One S bluetooth controller still not supported?

@Tomas1856 @ScottF @Tautvydas-Zilys

 

I figured it out. In the editor the string name for the controller is different than in the build.

In Editor the Xbox One S Bluetooth Controller is "Xbox Bluetooth Gamepad"
In the UWP runtime it's "Xbox Controller" and "Xbox Wireless Controller"
(Seems to be enumerated twice for some reason)

 

Now that I'm getting controller inputs I'm also running into this problem as well.

But for the Left Stick, Shared Triggers, and Right Trigger axis' only.

I wonder what's causing it.

[Update 1]
Interestingly enough, when I disconnected and reconnected the device while my app was still running the input axis' did correct themselves, but then the button inputs did not work.

Closing and opening the app again, resulted in stuck axis' again.

[Update 2]

I realized that I was getting motion from all joysticks and that was overriding the axis reading.

I was running my UWP app from the desktop with a mouse and keyboard. The Event System was putting the x and y axis' (and others) to the joystick's axis reading.

 

I've successfully used the "Xbox Controller Input for HoloLens" prefab which is available in the Unity Asset Store. I do have a problem with the controller needing to be re-paired every time I try to use it, though.