One of the great things about the Arma series is the ability to use head tracking for situational awareness. It is great to be able to look over your shoulder without the need to interrupt your current direction of travel or turn your back on potential threats ahead of you.
As many of you already know, the most common commercial head tracking hardware/software is TrackIR by NaturalPoint. This gear is excellent; plug and play, profiles already created and available for hundreds of games. But, it is expensive. The current version TrackIR (5) is 150.00-170.00 USD although you can still buy the last generation TrackIR (4 Pro) for 99.99.
While chatting with a beginner flight sim pilot the other day I found that his income level removed any hope of his purchasing a TrackIR and he was trying to compensate with the old fashioned hat switch.
So I shared this information with him:
There are two very cheap methods of getting head tracking for games; Freetrack and FacetracknoIR.
Freetrack has been around for a long time, I used it extensively for flight sims before I was forced to buy a TrackIR 5 to play Arma2 (of course they caved to public pressure soon after and added freetrack support, lol).
Freetrack is a open source (as of last year anyway) free to the public software designed to use everyday webcams that have been altered by removal of their Infrared (IR) filter, and adding a simple visible light filter instead (floppy disk media works great). Via the software, the camera can detect the position of an array of IR LEDs attached either to a hat or a clip on your head. When you move your head the Freetrack software translates this movement to the game that you are playing.
Pros: Webcams are cheap, the Software is free
Cons: You have to be a little bit handy with a soldering iron to make the LED array, the software has not been updated in over five years. You have to tweak the software to get the results that you want.
FacetracknoIR is a very interesting community based, free, software that does not require any modification to a webcam nor does it require an LED array. It captures the shape of your face and tracks that shape as you move your head around. The software then translates this to the game just as Freetrack and TrackIR does. Did I mention that it is free?
Pros: Webcams are cheap, software is free, no LED or reflector array, current and ongoing support and development by the community.
Cons: Tricky to get set up properly for your lighting conditions and movement. Takes a lot of tweaking to get comfortable with it.
The other day I decided to build our new pilot a Freetrack system, I have built dozens of them for various people over the years. With that in mind I went looking for a webcam that I know is excellent for the task; the PS3 "Eye".
The PS3 Eye was developed for the PS3 gaming console to track body movement via two lighted wands that the game player holds in their hands. Because it was developed specifically for this use it is capable of 120FPS and does NOT require the user to remove an IR filter. Even better?! They are CHEAP! You can pick them up at local gaming stores for 9.99 each (used). I bought two at GameStop yesterday.
The PS3 Eye is a USB device, Windows drivers have been developed and released by Code Laboratories and can be found here:
http://codelaboratories.com/products/eye/driver/I simply taped a piece of floppy disk media over the front of the lens and it was ready to go.
Since I was building a Freetrack System I decided to compare all three systems since I own a TrackIR 5 (on my Simpit) and TrackIR 4 (at my desktop).
Freetrack can be found here:
http://www.free-track.net/english/With freetrack there is a bug that causes the program to crash when you turn on the camera, this is fixed via a few updated files added to the program directory. Information is found here.
http://forum.free-track.net/index.php?showtopic=2416&page=1FacetracknoIR of course required me to remove the floppy disk media so it could clearly see my pretty..er...well....my face.
FacetracknoIR also required tweaking, much more so than Freetrack, but eventually I had the responses calmed down with a nice deadzone in the middle so my view didn't bounce around the screen with every movement of my head. But, it was not at all as smooth as I would prefer it. Freetrack and TrackIR are much smoother. One thing that I found extremely helpful is that FacetracknoIR also supports point tracking. In other words; having the camera look for and follow an IR LED array (ok, put the floppy disk media back on the camera) via a plugin called "Point Tracker". This made tracking much more stable and smooth. Still not up to Freetrack or TrackIR standards though.
A note on the PS3 Eye: I found that in both Freetrack and FacetracknoIR the camera acted buggy. I had to adjust the video stream settings (even if it is just moving a slider from one point and back to its original point) to get smooth operation. In Freetrack if I did not do this step before starting the camera the program would crash. In FacetracknoIR the tracking would simply be erratic.
Comparison:
Freetrack along with the PS3 Eye is, in my opinion, no worse nor better than either the TrackIR 4 or TrackIR 5 but all three are better than FacetracknoIR.
FacetracknoIR is still being developed and there might be more tweaks that I did not find and use last night and it is very much worth keeping an eye on. If you are not electronically inclined and the thought of using a soldering iron scares the bejubits out of you (that can get messy) than by all means use FacetracknoIR, once you get used to it you will appreciate the greatly increased situational awareness.
FacetracknoIR can be found here:
(if you use the PS3 Eye check under the Compatibility tab and look at the information on webcams. It will explain how to set the PS3 Eye to run at 120fps. Otherwise it will default to 30fps. This works for both Freetrack and FacetracknoIR)
http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htmI know that for Arma3 many of you use 3rd person (boo hiss!, lol) and you will find that head tracking is also a great tool from that viewpoint allowing you to look around, increase elevation, slide the viewpoint sideways, etc without changing the orientation of your avatar.
Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who wants to use headtracking but does not want to take the expensive plunge that is TrackIR.