Posted by: Ddean
How does track IR work in DCS? If youre looking right behind you, what screen are you looking at? Or do you turn your head much less than 180 to see 180 on the screen?
It's really customizable, so you can have it at about 1:1 for say a racing game, when you just need to shift your view by 10 or 15 degrees either way to see mirrors, I use something that resembles an exponential curve for flight sims, so shifting your head less than say 5 degrees, yields hardly any movement (less than 1:1 ration), but the further you rotate, the greater the rate, so if my head is turned about 20 degrees from center (which is still pretty comfortable, you're facing directly behind you. You can also have it accelerate at a linear rate too, or define different linear rates for ranges of motion. Then each preset is bound to the game, so you can have multiple profiles.
Pitch, roll and yaw curves are all customizable on the TrackIR, as well as X, Y axis movement (closer to, or further from monitor, as well as left - right parallel movement). Being able to move your head closer to the monitor to zoom in on controls for more granular control is pretty nice.
I've also build my own head tracker using an EDTracker kit that uses accelerometers to track head movement and a magnetometer to keep drift in check, but it was definitely not as accurate and couldn't track movement in X/Y and couldn't really keep track of roll as well. Fun little project though.
TrackIR actually seems really expensive compared to the VR stuff now. It only does motion tracking, no screens etc and for the unit, and the clip for your headset is about $250. An EDTracker kit is about $20 if you can solder and it does a pretty damned good job for the price.
