Headtracking - Arduino supremacy

[Zozobra]

I have fucked about with LED based headtracking before with some limited success and a lot of faff. My main beef with LED/TrackIR methods is that they suck ass if you're more than 2' away from the camera, and I am as I play on a TV in my living room. But I have had a taste of just how great headtracking can be when it works. It's obviously awesome for flight sims and the such and Elite dangerous is now upon us for space war super fun times but it is also fucking awesome for driving sims. Being able to look to the apex allows for a much better assessment of just how much you've missed your braking point by

So what to do? A TrackIR is expensive and probably wont work for my needs but I wan't, no need this capability in my games. FTnoIR is too temperamental and spanks CPU. Thankfully some clever chap who've been playing the Elite alpha have some experience with Arduino dev kits and they've built what looks to be the ultimate in minimal fucking about, cheap and accessible headtracking. No more cocking about with LEDs or pulling PS3 eyetoys apart Better still they have PCBs and full working kits available for not much $$$. I've ordered myself one. I suspect I wont see it until next year but I can't wait to try it out. This may well be the thing to get me back into War Thunder!

Check it out:
http://edtracker.org.uk

[chris_d]

Hmm, keep us poasted w/ your 'speriments. Now that i have built a brute system i will re-visit my PS2Eye/PointTracker testings. In the end, i expect that it will generally be as you say, a bit too resource intensive to expect to do what it needs to.

The last i looked into it, i basically came away feeling that much of the reason that the TrackIR works, is because of the hardware thresholding that the camera itself is doing, reducing, at the source, the amount of bandwidth that the USB connection needs to pass continuously in order to function smoothly/accurately enough.

To do this thresholding AFTER the full res/bit image has already traversed the USB bus and entered the PC, just means that in addition to the bus bandwidth requirements, now the CPU must also work overtime to process excessively massive data and then reduce/threshold it itself, in order to send smallish data/information to the game engine in question as essentially XY or XYZ joystick info. It is just about the most inefficient way to do what needs doing. In a way the TrackIR camera is a pretty elegant/clever/simple solution. Just too pricy/easy for me, i guess.

[Zozobra]

For me the problems with freetrack and the like were largely due to it behaving erratically with hilarious consequences or CPU overload. I do hope this arduino effort offers an elegant low CPU solution. It certainly looks promising.

There will of course be a full report once it is in my possession. The internet has largely responded positively to it and it certainly looks good. I wonder if future models might support 6 dof. That would be awesome.

[Zozobra]

This works great. I can't say much more than that really. It makes dog fighting in elite so much easier and it adds to the immersion. Best thing is that it uses pretty much zero resources and I don't have to be sat 2' from the screen as that is somewhat impractical with a 42" TV

I've played a good 4 hours with it tonight and it didn't dick me off once which is a far cry from my point tracking experiences. If pitch and yaw will do for your needs then I'd say it's worth building or buying one.