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The Gyroscope

The Steam Controller has a gyroscope inside - a highly accurate sensor for detecting the controller's rotation. It allows you to do things in-game like:

• Control cameras in an exploration game

• Aim precisely in an FPS

• Move a mouse cursor around the screen for casual mouse focused games

• Turn a car's steering wheel/plane's yoke in driving/flying games

• And much more just by turning the controller! 

The past several years have seen a growing, avid userbase discovering the benefits of the gyroscope, showing that it has a high skill ceiling. When mastered, it can be as good as using a mouse - and often more fun!

It's worth noting that setting up the Gyro can sometimes require a lot of adjusting/testing and is generally game dependent as well, meaning you might need to tweak further for each game. 

This initial guide is meant to help you get started without too much tweaking needed. We'll also be doing a deeper dive on some of this sometime in the near future.

Quick Guide

You can enable Gyro by choosing a Gyro Behavior Mode, either from the Quick Settings Menu:

... or inside the Edit Layout->Gyro screen:

The Gyro dropdown in the Controller Settings Quick Menu gives us 3 modes to play with (there are others which you can access in the gyro screen within Edit Layout, but this guide will focus on the three in the quick menu).

These translate gyro motions into virtual mouse or joystick movements

• Gyro to Mouse

  • Used to mimic a mouse cursor, or to control a camera (aiming)

• Gyro to Joystick (Camera)

  • Gyro Speed is used to rotate a standard joystick-driven camera.

• Gyro to Joystick (Deflection)

  • Turn the controller to simulate vehicle steering controls, or an airplane's yoke, via a virtual joystick.

Which Gyro Mode Is Best?

Generally, Gyro to Mouse is recommended for the best game feel. There are two exceptions:

• If you want to simulate vehicle steering controls we recommend Gyro to Joystick (Deflection).

• If a game doesn't handle mixed input (simultaneous mouse and gamepad input) 

  • You can tell if this is a problem if the game behaves strangely when both gyro and joystick are moved at once: UI glyphs may flicker, or the camera's movement may stutter.

  • We have a couple of work-arounds to fix this:

    • Keep using Gyro to Mouse, but set up your configuration to mimic Keyboard and Mouse buttons only - the downside is that game may not display the gamepad button prompts.

    • If you want to keep the gamepad button glyphs, use Gyro to Joystick (camera). The downside is that this tends to take more setup to get the feel right, since every game treats the joystick response differently.

Common Settings: Gyro Activation Buttons

All three Gyro Modes give you options to temporarily turn off the gyroscope in order to "reset" your hands back to center after rotating too far - much like lifting a mouse to reset its position on your desktop. This is also known as "ratcheting".

We allow you to set this up with any button combination you like. We also provide some settings to adjust exactly how this works. You can get to this setting by clicking the gear next to the Gyro behavior drop down. 

This will take you to the Gyro settings menu, at the top you will see the gyro activation buttons options. 

1. Choose Gyro Button(s) - this is the button that will enable/disable gyro when pressed down. By default it is set to the touch sensor in the right trackpad and the touch sensor in the right thumbstick - same as the Steam Deck. As long as your finger is touching one of those things, the gyro will be enabled. 

2. Gyro Enable/Suppress/Toggle - by default the button you chose for item 1 will turn Gyro ON while the button is activated. You can set it to Suppress - meaning Gyro is always on UNLESS the button is currently activated. Or you can set it to Toggle, which will switch Gyro from on to off (or vice versa) on an activation. 

3. Multiple Gyro Button Behavior - if you have multiple buttons selected, this determines whether you need to be pressing/holding all of them or just one (any) of them.

Here is a quick set of instructions to get set up with our suggested options:

• Select the Choose Gyro Button(s) button (item 1 above).

• The Gyro Buttons popup appears: Select the button you'd like to control the gyro's activity. You can pick any combination. We recommend using both grip sensors for this; but triggers, trackpads or the capacitive stick sensors are also commonly used.

• Choose whether you want the buttons to Enable, Suppress, or Toggle the gyro by clicking on Gyro Enable/Suppress/Toggle (number 2 above). For this recommended set up, we suggest "Hold to Enable Gyro"

  

• (Optional) When you have multiple Gyro Buttons selected, you can choose "Any" or "All" buttons to Enable/Suppress/Toggle the gyro. When using the Grip Sensors, we recommend "All". Click in item 3 above to open up the options.

A note about Gyro haptics: Grip sensors don't have any physical feedback of their own (by design - holding in a button for a long time can be fatiguing!) but you can turn on a haptic effect to help physically confirm that they've registered a grip or release.

You can also turn on a haptic effect that will activate each time the controller rotates through an assigned angle, this gives you physical feedback as you rotate the controller.

• At the bottom of the Gyro settings screen you will see a haptics menu. They will be defaulted to "Off".
   

• If you turn item 1 or 2 to anything other than "off" new options will open up (see items 3 and 4 below):

  

• In items 3 and 4 you can adjust the settings for these haptics. 

Common Gyro Settings: Sensitivity

All three gyro modes have these settings in common. Again, you can access these settings by clicking on the gear next to the Gyro behavior drop down. The sections that primarily affect sensitivity and other output modulations are shown below: 

1. Gyro Angles to Mouse Pixels: (Advanced) This setting is used to make real world angles line up with in-game angles - this takes some fine tuning so we recommend skipping for now.

2. Gyro Sensitivity: Higher values will make the camera (or mouse) move faster in response to your turns. This is going to be a new gyro user's primary slider to adjust when getting into a new game. We've found people gradually increase this as they start to get the hang of gyro.

3. Invert X/Y: Toggle these on to invert the Horizontal (X) or Vertical (Y) outputs.

4. Vertical/Horizontal Output Mixer: Moving the bar to the left will reduce vertical output, whereas moving it to the right will reduce horizontal output. Your wrists have more freedom of movement vertically than horizontally when holding the controller with both hands, so we recommend setting the slider toward the left side (reduced vertical output). Again, tune to taste.

5. Gyro Speed Deadzone: this is option 1 of 2 that can help you reduce tremors/shakes. This will entirely stop gyro output if the gyro moves slower than the given speed value. A high Deadzone will cause the gyro to feel a little unresponsive - most proficient users turn it to 0. It's still useful in "Drag and Drop" interfaces, so that you don't accidentally drag when you mean to click. Think of it as a way to simulate the friction of a mouse against a mouse pad.

6. Gyro Precision Speed: this is option 2 of 2 that can help you reduce tremors/shakes. Adjust this if you feel like your fast motions are good, but your fine/precise motions are too fast or a bit shaky. This will merely reduce the output movement when moving slower than the given speed. This can help you with fine movements, without a loss of perceived responsiveness. 

We'll share details about the advanced options and more in an advanced Steam Input setup guide coming soon.

Gyro to Joystick Common Settings: Joystick Output

As mentioned above, instead of setting your Gyro to mouse, you can also use one of the two Joystick modes.

Both modes mimic a joystick:

• Gyro to Joystick Camera: This maps the speed of the controller's rotation to the joystick's position. Turning your controller pushes the joystick in a direction; keeping your controller still brings the joystick back to its center.

• Gyro to Joystick Deflection: This mode maps the controller's relative rotation to that of the joystick. In this mode, rolling your controller left/right is like turning a steering wheel - the stick's position matches how far you've turned the controller from a starting point.

Unlike Gyro to Mouse mode, these modes won't trigger "Mixed Input" issues like "Button-Glyph Flickering" in a typical game.

The downside is that it can be difficult get a good feeling Gyro to Joystick mapping - this is dependent on how each game translates joystick input into camera movement, and how patient you are with tuning.

The most important value to tweak is the Minimum Joystick Output.

You are trying to make this line up with the game's joystick deadzone setting. A typical game will have a deadzone of anywhere between 20% to 45%. When correctly lined up, your smallest gyro movements should convert into the smallest detectable joystick readings in the game. This will take a lot of tweaking, but we suggest starting at around 30%.

While tweaking Gyro to Camera Joystick: small movements might be suppressed by the default gyro deadzones, and it's useful to turn the "Gyro Speed Deadzone" and "Gyro Precision Speed" to Zero so that even small movements are coming through. Once you have found the right joystick remapping values, remember to revert the “Gyro Speed Deadzone” and “Gyro Precision Speed” back to your preference.

In some games, you can find joystick deadzone settings - for the best gyro feel, we recommend that you reduce the in game deadzone as close to zero as it will go. If you do so, you may want to increase Steam Input's joystick deadzones to compensate, as a more sensitive in game joystick deadzone will result in more phantom movement from your joysticks.

For Gyro to Joystick Camera: We've seen some awesome community-made tutorials around this, and recommend looking around and learning from each other. We'll have more detailed guides covering more advanced aspects of gyro remapping in the future.

Drift Calibration

If your gyro is active and you're holding the controller still, but notice that your aim continuously drifts in one direction over time, you may be witnessing "Gyro Drift" - a very common phenomenon in gyro controllers, but also easily fixed.

Find the "Calibrate" button at the bottom of the Controller Settings-> Edit Layout-> Gyro Page

... Or at the bottom of the Controller Settings Quick Settings, or, alternatively, inside the Steam Controller Calibration settings.

Calibration requires you place the controller on a stable surface so that the drift can be detected and subtracted. Follow the wizard and within a few seconds, the drift should be gone.

If you still encounter drift, double check that the source of the drift isn't coming from your joysticks - you can temporarily set your Joystick mode to "None" to make sure.

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