Hi All,

Happy Friday !

I have been toying with the idea of a head tracker for a while but Track IR 5 is nearly $500 in Canada which is outrageous so I decided to look at alternatives. First I picked up a used PS3 Eye cam for $10 and tried facetracknoir (Face tracking) which was OK but not that accurate. I then posted a question on the Opentrack Github page about head tracking without an IR clip and was told about Aruco Markers. Basically you print out a special marker, mount it to a piece of card or other stiff material and stick it to a baseball cap/hat. Opentrack which is 100% free then tracks the position of the marker and translates this to movement in the respected game. I was at first a little skeptical and my wife nearly peed her pants when she saw me buzzing around in the TBM with what looked like a big QR code stuck to my hat but I tell you it is fantastic. It takes a little setting up and tweaking but boy is it ever worth it if you want to try head tracking for a tiny investment.

I will probably end up ordering a Delan clip package with a modified PS3 Eye & LED clip which is way cheaper than Track IR 5 but for now I am going to continue with the setup I have.

Take a look at the following if you are interested:

https://codelaboratories.com/products/eye/driver/  (This is a couple of $$ for a Win 10 driver for the PS3 Eye)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajoUzwe1bT0&list=PLB_lW2Mzmj6o9O7XjAAW5DLAg7sZwi0fn&index=8 (Aruco Marker Tutorial)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDz-bholoMo (Opentrack calibration tutorial) This made a world of difference for me and made the tracking very stable

This may have been discussed before but I thought it was worthy of a mention as it works brilliantly in MSFS 2020 & X-Plane 11. There are plenty of good YT tutorials on setting up Opentrack with various flight sims

Edited October 30, 20205 yr by Richdem

Look at smooth track on Apple or google store.  I only paid £10 and it works by using open track. Best 10 quid I ever spent and works across all games that use track IR like elite dangerous, racing sims etc!

5 hours ago, sidfadc said:

Look at smooth track on Apple or google store.  I only paid £10 and it works by using open track. Best 10 quid I ever spent and works across all games that use track IR like elite dangerous, racing sims etc!

I did try smooth track first of all,

it just didn’t work that well for me unfortunately which led me to look for an alternative. I do hear good things about it though 

I'm a Aruco user too for some years now. Its very smooth. Oké, I'm looking odd while flying but who cares.

There's a second advantage beside the low costs. It doesn't use any CPU power which all other headtrackers do. 

On 10/30/2020 at 4:49 PM, RJC68 said:

but Track IR 5 is nearly $500 in Canada which is outrageous so I decided to look at alternatives

I’ve a track ir 5 if you want it for £100?

Always good to hear about an alternative, thanks. I've been leaning toward giving Tobii Eyetracker a go. Fairly expensive but seems like a good product.