TrackIR and head tracking discussion

Which is why I prefer the 'Delan Clip', it's metal and pretty much indestructible, even the wireless 'Fusion' version looks very sturdy, but as I don't own one of those YET, I cannot say what materials are used.

 

I have the Delan Clip Fusion and I like it. My only criteria when I got it is that I wanted something to replace the Track Ir Clip because I didn't want to wear a hat every time and I also wanted wireless. The Fusion is basically the Delan Clip with a 3D printed housing around it. It uses a micro USB connection to charge. The only gripe I have with it is that I wish the velcro dot that came with it to attach the Fusion to headphones was a little bit bigger. That's a cheap, easy fix though, I just haven't done it yet to mine.

 

That's because you were using FreeTrack. It's old software which was even a bit glitchy in its day with some games and hasn't been updated for many years. Opentrack and FaceTrackNoIR are both still being actively developed and are stable and far more configurable. I've compared my Opentrack setup to TrackIR 5 and there's no noticeable difference in performance. In fact, I'd say that it's better than the basic TrackIR because it's less sensitive to room lighting and reflections. The biggest drawback used to be that you had to make the LED hardware yourself but that's no longer the case.

As Opentrack and FaceTrackNoIR are both fully compatible with TrackIR, there's really no compelling reason to buy TrackIR. Buying a ready-to-go setup from TrackHat or Delan is only about 1/4 the cost of the TrackIR equivalent (with the Track Clip Pro) and you actually get a better-made, more robust, LED source. I made my own LED hardware and, including the PS Eye camera, the whole setup only cost me about £18 in the UK (including the Windows driver for the camera). The Opentrack software (my preferred solution) is completely free and FaceTrackNoIR cost me less than the price of a coffee.

 

Everything has evolved of course .... at this time I had a cheap camera, no LED hardware and moreover I was ( and still am ) driving with a very dim light, rather late in the evening.... and that was mostly a big problem without LEDs.
I'm only using TrackIR 5 now as I didn't buy it .... new. and got it at a very good price.

 

ACC has Track IR support now? I've tried multiple times, and saved a profile for it but still no headtrack movement. Most games/sims you just load it up and go. Am I missing something here??

 

Turn on the camera? ;-)

Honestly, it's plug and play for me. The tracking freaks out at times so I have to restart the camera. But apart from that, it works great.

 

Ha! Yeah bit weird..I use it in DCS and IL2 all the time, and its just 'on'. for some reason nothing happens for me in ACC. Both green lights com on though to show that the camera is working, and being picked up by the game.

 

So I ordered a TrackIR and got it working but - I don't like it :-( I think I probably need to get the profile set up correctly because the one that ACC provided doesn't do it for me at all unfortunately. I fiddled for a while and it's better, but I still can't get something that feels natural. I'm able to use it to glance it my mirrors (which is fairly useful) but when I'm looking to the apex and cornering it's more distracting than anything else and I mess up the corner. I had a league race last night, so decided to race without it.

It's a little frustrating as it seems like it should be great, particularly on my ultrawide, but not so far. Any suggestions please?? :-(

 

I can see that and i had quite some frusty moments in the beginning as well. Probably because i went in to extreme with the settings in the beginning. I dont have TrackIR , but Opentrack,
Ive been testing quite a bit and i found out that for me to get fully adjusted to it, i have to start with very little movements. So all settings i had, i halved the amounts of input on the axis multiple times.
Best to start with only Yaw and maybe roll and then work your way up.
Ive for now settled on the settings in Opentrack:
yaw input 45 x 10 degrees

Roll 20 x 5 degrees

Roll 60 x 6 degrees

Smoothness with Accela filter @ +- 1.85 , Deadzones on Default.
These are for me the most consistent for now and i finally got used to it. Its a very low movement start point for me to work on, if i feel the need at all.
Perhaps it can help u.
X, Y ,Z axis i found it more distracting then useful, but YMMV.

 

Reduce the camera movement range a lot. I set it so that I can see the right A-pillar (horizontal limit) and the dashboard (vertical limit).

And then you need a bit of practice in hot lap mode. I first counterdteered my head movements but that went away, quickly.

 

Not sure why you’d want the roll axis active in a racing sim as the car body doesn't really roll. Seems like unnecessary processing. I just use yaw and pitch.

 

Because many people, including myself, tilt their heads in turns when racing in RL or a sim. It has nothing to do with the car rolling and why would it? It's head tracking, not car tracking.

 

The roll axis is the only one I don't use. It feels a bit weird when I do roll my head to have the screen rotate with it. It's unnecessary to my mind as the world (monitor included) already rotates relative to my view without assistance.

 

This makes sense and it's a valid point, IMO. For me, it's different, though: with yaw and pitch, I have this "accelerated head movement" from head tracking. It feels natural to me if the rotation behaves identical to yaw and pitch.

In general, head tracking is at its best for me if all DOFs are active. It feels strange to be able to move your head in some directions, while others are locked.

But in the end all of this is very much down to personal preference - there's no right or wrong.

BTW: do you also struggle with camera wandering? I have to re-center like twice a lap.

 

Yeah, know what you mean. If I just sit in the car and look around the lack of roll does feel odd, but once I'm driving it feels better without it... maybe it's just me!

I do get a bit of wander, but not a lot at all. I only really notice it if the IRs go completely or of the cameras view for a while for example. Generally I can go for quite a while without re-centring. I'm using trackhat plus though, you?

 

I use TrackHat. Plus or not should make no difference. The wandering isn't huge, just enough to be slightly annoying. In OpenTrack, there's some offset you can set for off-camera situations or so...do you know what that means? There's no good explanation on that. It seems to prevent false detections...when you hold your LEDs in a weird way so that yaw is mistaken for roll and so on.
Also, I didn't properly limit the input. You can see in @GroteBakkes curves that the x axis stops at 20, which he selected in the mapping window. I don't know if my OpenTrack version has that option - will check it when back home.

 

Camera offset is for when the camera is not directly in front and centre of you, so it can work out the correct motion parallax I think.

Trackhat's opentrack does not have the 'max input' drop-downs, but I also have an open source version of opentrack which does have these.

 

Nice, thank you. It's all clear now. Could you provide a link to the open source version, please?

 

https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack/releases
I used to keep up-to-date with the latest releases. but TBH, since using trackhat I tend to use only their software as I wasn't using anything that wasn't bundled in their version.

 

With TIR5 and the hat sensors I get no wandering at all, I only centre at the start of a session.

I have to be quite careful with the light though, my man cave has a south facing window and direct sun bouncing off the sensors sends TIR nuts. I have a tight fitting blackout blind on the window. With my Rift DK2 I can leave the blind up, no problems ever.