Head tracking
Head tracking or face tracking is when the in-sim view follows your head movements. This is usually scaled down, making it possible to look directly aft in FlightGear while in real life turning your head no more than that you still can see the entire screen.
This can be done from as simple as only horizontal panning all the way to following both rotation and movement round and along all three axis. This is often referred to as degrees of freedom (DoF). Simple panning would be 1 DoF while all rotations and translations would be 6 DoF.
Though there is no head tracking built into FlightGear (as of may 2016) there are still various ways to achieve that.
Head tracking methods
There are many ways to do head tracking. The ones cheapest to implement will use your web camera and will follow your face or some markers to figure out where your head is and how it is rotated.
Some ways will use IR cameras, either using LED light markers or a single IR light at the camera and some reflective markers. The last method is used by some of the more popular commercial products.
Using head tracking in FlightGear
As FlightGear is very flexible there are many ways head tracking could be implemented. Often some external head tracking software will interface with FlightGear such that the rotations and translations is read into properties that in turn are used for panning and moving the view.
Related content
Wiki articles
Forum topics
- Setting up my flight gear? May 2016
- How-to: motion tracking controller using vJoy and FreePIE February 2016
- Headtrack January 2011–November 2015
- FaceTracking: which views are movable ? May–June 2013
- Offset problem with infra-red headtracker April 2012
- Something for your sim pit? (Eye-following projector) June 2011
- linux-track and FlightGear March 2011–March 2014
- Typhoon+Grand Canyon+FaceTrackNoIR=AwEsOmE March 2011
- First update FaceTrackNoIR June 2010–March 2011
- Anything new related to FreeTrack/TrackIR? April 2009–July 2010
- Integration with OpenCV February 2007
Developer mailing list threads
- [Flightgear-devel] SteamVR January 2016
- [Flightgear-devel] Kinect for pc for head tracking? March 2013
- [Flightgear-devel] FG Input though socket or anyway? August 2011
- [Flightgear-devel] Enable headtracking in FlightGear? April 2010
- [Flightgear-devel] Depth percepted cockpit January–February 2008
- [Flightgear-devel] Extending generic protocol for binary input streams. September 2007–March 2009
- [Flightgear-devel] Formation Flying May 2006
Source code
- flightgear/fgdata/next/Nasal/view.nas – Nasal module that handles the view panning and translation, and related properties.