Beat Saber has increased the known limits of human endeavor

SteamVR, the virtual reality control system from Valve for Steam, has been beta updated thanks to data gleaned from Beat Saber players. According to Valve, they coded “sanity checks” into their tracking system based on what they thought was the upper limit of physical motion. Exceeding those checks caused errors as the system interpreted that data as tracking mistakes.

“It turns out that a properly motivated human using a light enough controller could go faster (3600 degrees/sec!) than we thought.”

Beat Saber players were turning their hands from palms up to palms down, and vice versa, in 50 milliseconds. Add that to the same pile as “the four-minute mile will never be broken.”