What causes controller haptics not firing in Unity XR?

You are calling the haptic API on the wrong interactor or input device, or with an amplitude/duration of zero, so no impulse reaches the controller.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Controller Haptics Not Firing in Unity XR

Quick answer: Call SendHapticImpulse on the controller's XRBaseControllerInteractor (or the InputDevice for the correct hand) with amplitude and duration above zero.

Haptic feedback in VR is sent per-device, so the call has to reference the actual left or right controller. Sending to a stale device handle, the head device, or with zero amplitude produces silence. The XR Interaction Toolkit exposes a simple impulse method on the controller that targets the right device.

How to fix it

1. Target the right device

Get the controller via the interactor's xrController or query InputDevices for the correct XRNode hand so the impulse goes to that controller.

2. Send a non-zero impulse

Call SendHapticImpulse(amplitude, duration) with amplitude between 0 and 1 and a duration like 0.1 seconds; zero values do nothing.

3. Check the capability

Verify the device reports the haptic capability before sending, since some bindings (hand tracking, certain emulators) have no rumble channel.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.