Hi everyone. 

I plan to summarize this info in another post, and include it in the SETUP AND DOCUMENTATION guide soon.  But for now, I just want to get the information out there, quickly, so more users can have a better experience.

Tl;Dr: The Quest is building its own 'map' of your home, and uses this for alignment. This mapping profile 'learns' and takes in more data about the environment as you move through your space.  You can train it so it understands connected rooms, doorways, and larger spaces.

So, I realized this only yesterday. I had an unusually bright day here in Vancouver, and my Quest didn't pick up on the normal guardian/prompted me to create a new one. Ok.  Created it, set floor, and disabled the Guardian.

This is considered a 'fresh' start. The quest only knows about this room i've started in, and is now 'mapping' a series of points that it is seeing through the camera. It uses all these visual point markers to determine my location in space. The important point: The map doesn't have any information about the stuff in my hallway, or anything through the doorway to my bedroom. As I move through these areas, the quest is constantly adding new markers to its point of reference and updating its own 'map'/understanding the spatial relationship between all the visual markers in my house.

Now, if I step through a doorway into a room that I've never used the quest in before, the quest will be flooded with a tonne of new points/markers to add to its mapping profile, and it tries to do this very quickly. At the same time, the part of the quest software that determines where to put you in 3d space might freak out,  there is a threshold where, if it is suddenly presented with like 75%new visual information and cant see anything from the area that it had previously 'mapped out',  it may suddenly reset your tracking and shift you to a random position in the world (basically, it tries to start this whole 'mapping' process over again, thinking you are in a new home now, and places you in the center of it)

Here's the thing though, this this was the big realization from yesterday. If I step back into my living room (where I started, and where the quest already built a 'map') and then I stand still for a second, the quest will usually recognize the room, snap back to the 'proper' orientation and re-load the 'map' information that it has stored about this particular setup. This includes the flood of new markers that were added inside the bedroom/through the doorframe, just before tracking failed. So, now I can walk through the doorframe, and the quest already knows what markers to look for once I am through the doorway.  No tracking problems.

The tracking only fails once. As long as you can reset back to your 'good' tracking profile, it will usually learn from its mistakes and allow your access to the new area the second time you try.

That's my theory. at least.

So, obviously this is a kick in the face for new users, as they are boldly venturing out trying to map new rooms that they have never tried to play in before, and are going to get the 'tracking failed/I'm lost' error the first time. It's already complicated enough without passthrough camera. I'm trying to figure out what the best option is, am thinking that it would be very helpful to just 'take off your quest while it's running in the home environment, and just walk from room to room first, let the oculus software build a good tracking profile before you even launch the app.

I also need to understand more about what causes the Quest to 'forget' the space VS remember the mapping profile and keep adding on to the same thing. Seems it happened randomly to me because of brightness, and just resetting the guardian boundary/turning guardian on/off isn't enough to actually reset the tracking profile/map that it creates.

Shrug. I think, ultimately, this info will REALLY help new users, and maybe other users who felt that a certain room 'just doesn't work' because they tried to map it once. and it failed. Try again. System is learning.