But in life you more often times change your view with your eyes not your head. You don't put you chin on your chest to look down !! Its why quit using any "head" movement apps. Now, give me an eye motion detector and I'm all over it!

 

I don't think you've thought this through :). What happens when you want to look to the side using only your eyes, and an eye tracker? Right, you look away from the screen :). Using your head and a TrackIR is as close as you'll get to "real" view control with only flat screens.

Thanks for posting that video! This is what TrackIR is all about... try doing that with joystick hat switches or your mouse!

 

Off to do some research!

I may be wrong, but in that video it doesn't look like there was ever a need to hit the pesky "reset views" key to get the view back to dead center. That's what has stopped me trying to use Trackir with "mouselook" or whatever it's called. This video looked smooth all the way through. I'd like to know how that was managed...

FreeTrack:

 

http://www.free-track.net/english/

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeTrack

 

Hook

Most replies seem to have missed the point of this thread, OP is not questioning the support of head tracking but rather the support of one particular brand of head tracking (TrackIR™) when it is just as easy to support all kinds of head tracking like FSX did via SimConnect (also making EZdok possible).

 

This video seems to indicate there is already some kind of support available.

 

 

The person that posted that video is a Free-Track programmer, according to their forums. The description of the video references FreeTrack 2.3, while the current version is only 2.2. So it looks like Free-Track might have something in the works.

 

From what I know about FreeTrack (which isn't that much, admittedly), MS Flight would still need some update to be able to interface with Free-Track the way that video shows. For example, he can't be using mouse emulation mode, since he uses the mouse to click in the VC and moves his head at the same time.

 

Perhaps MS provided a beta of a Head Tracking-compatible release to Free Track for them to try out. Hopefully Natural Point has it too...

 

*note* - Edited extensively once I realized who the video was posted by. All mentions of "hacking" removed.

Edited April 25, 201214 yr by malibu43

How about FaceTrackNoir? Is that an option worth trying?

A couple of interesting points from that video.

 

One, the mouse doesn't move when he's looking around the cockpit; it stays in the same spot relative to the cockpit until he moves the mouse. Therefore the mouse isn't being used in any way to move the view.

 

Two, he's able to tilt his head. The cockpit tilts in some of the views where he's watching the other aircraft. As far as I know, there are no Flight commands to tilt your head.

 

Looks like he's gotten some access to the internals of Flight. Possibly Flight uses a lot of the same memory data structures FSX did, and he's tapping directly into those, the same way the GPS widget for Flight does. In any case I'm impressed.

 

Hook

Yeah, this does appear to a teaser for something in development, not a solution currently available.

 

But it is clearly full 6DoF head tracking in Flight, and it can't be far away if they are offering a teaser video. I'm very hopeful about seeing this come to fruition soon.

With only 3DOF FaceTrackNoir isn't bad, but it isn't great. Those translation axes make a world of difference when leaning around cockpit posts, looking down the side or leaning over to get a better view of switch on the panel.

 

I'm not sure if the other choices besides TrackIR rotate/translate the view plane when you change your virtual facing. What this means is that when I am looking 90 degrees to the left and want to get closer to the door, I can lean my head forward as I would in real life. In early versions of TrackIR, this "TrueView" feature was not available, so I would have to lean Left to lean closer to the door. It was very unnatural and disorienting. I would be surprised if Freetrack couldn't do this however.

Hi,

 

Two, he's able to tilt his head. The cockpit tilts in some of the views where he's watching the other aircraft. As far as I know, there are no Flight commands to tilt your head.

 

After my OP I had second thoughts about there already being commands that TrackIR could use. I thought about "Slew (tilt right or left)" which simulates head banking in FSX. I watched Himmel's video and it certainly appeared that head banking was present but I wasn't 100% sure that that was the case.

Does TrackIR support head banking?

 

Jim F.

Yes you can bank your head using TIR. You can do what you would do IRL (only the real head movements are much smaller). In fact you can show Linda Blair that you mean business if you amplify the curves enough!

 

I have never tried FreeTrack but it does sound like it offers very similar functionality.

It's "6 Degrees of Freedom."

 

That yields rotation of the head in all 3 dimensions (pitch, roll, and yaw) as well of movement of the head along all 3 axises (vertical, lateral and longitudinal... or, up/down, left/right and forward/back), all accomplished with subdued versions of the natural body motions you would use for those movements.

 

An interesting question comes up: Why would Microsoft provide the internal information or a special version of the game to a freeware tracking developer, but not to TrackIR?

 

One reason I can think of is that TrackIR uses a proprietary control method rather than the standard joystick methods of control. For me, that's as good a reason as any (Sorry, TrackIR). Another possibility is that the freeware version won't be free. A third is that Microsoft saw potential in an open interface that could be used with any camera, and also includes the TrackIR camera. That one's my favorite so far, and no one's locked into specific hardware.

 

It may just be that the programmer involved is very talented and has been able to exchange the necessary information directly with Flight without having a special version. Nothing wrong with this, and a lot of people will win... except maybe TrackIR, but they'll still sell a bunch of units.

 

Just a guess, but if there isn't any evidence of having to reset the view in that video, then maybe FreeTrack is using joystick control methods rather than whatever TrackIR uses. Does anyone NOT think this is a better solution?

 

Hook

Hi,

 

In fact you can show Linda Blair that you mean business if you amplify the curves enough!

360 degrees?

 

Jim F.

Im very impressed with the video! THATS what TrackIR and other tracking methods brings to a sim! It seems like they are tapping into the standard HID interface in Windows to control the viewport. Im not very sure if this has any official support, and I doubt that, but if they can do it without MS, why cant TiR? They did it in the past! The original FSX did NOT have FSX support, but NP was able to tap into the provided resources (Simconnect) to do it. Why must this sort of thing always be MS's fault?