Head Tracking Systems

I've recently subscribed to Computer Pilot magazine and was reading an article last night about a product called TrackIR (naturalpoint.com). The product comes with an infrared camera and light unit that sits on top of your computer screen and some reflective stickers you put on a baseball cap (or on your forehead I guess), and software that allows the camera to track your head movements based on the reflected infrared light.

For flight simulation, the advantage is that you can turn your head a little to the left to look left and FSX responds by shifting the view on screen to the left. Currently, I'm using the hat switch on my joystick (sort of a joystick on the joystick) for this purpose, but that can be distracting when you'll also trying to maneuver, say for landing. Also, the hat switch only gives you look left/right and look up/down. FSX also supports keystrokes for shifting your whole head left/right/up/down/back/forward which would simulate leaning it towards the instruments or raising up in your seat to get a better view over the hood, etc. The key combinations for those motions are ctrl-shift-enter and such, which are naturally hard to use when you're maneuvering the airplane. There aren't enough buttons on the joystick to map those commands to, and even if they were it would be tough to use them except in straight and level flight.

TrackIR on the other hand tracks your head movement and can accomodate all of those motions naturally without you having to remember what buttons to press. The only problem is that it costs $150, and if I had $150 I'd probably spend it on a flight yoke or rudder peddles first.

Then today, was on Dino Cattaneo's blog (where I downloaded those new planes) and saw a reference to FreeTrack (free-track.net), which is a freeware software that lets you do the same thing with a web came ($20-30) and some LED's on a hat. Should be a lot cheaper, so I may check this out.