Described herein are devices and techniques for managing power consumption of a position tracking device. The position tracking device may be a virtual reality (VR) controller having multiple optical sensors oriented to receive optical signals from different directions. A stationary optical emitter projects a laser line into a space and repeatedly scans the laser line through the space. For any given scan, some of the sensors may detect the laser line and some of the sensors may not detect the laser line because they are oriented away from the emitter or because of a blocking object. When an individual sensor fails to detect a laser scan, that sensor is disabled for one or more subsequent laser scans in order to reduce power consumption of the VR controller.