Date:
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Author:
Jason Wall
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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TrackIR 4 Pro Point-of-View Headset

This infrared motion tracking system gets clipped onto your headset or visor and allows you to change your POV in-game by merely moving your head. This is a great idea, but does it work, and who is it for?

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Gaming Performance

Based upon the videos that we had seen of the TrackIR in action, we knew that the only games in our line-up that it could have a significant effect on would be Flight Simulator X and Battlefield 2142. We wanted to test NFS: Carbon, but the latest NFS titles have not supported free POV perspective – it only gives a rear view. So we downloaded a demo for GTR 2, another fairly popular racing game that came out in Fall of 2006. (Natural Point has a list of supported free demos here and a full list of supported titles here.)

Battlefield 2142

There was no profile for this title in the TrackIR software, so we had to tinker with it a bit. In the manual, we saw that there was an entry for “playing a game with no profile.” Well, that sounded exactly like what we needed, so we went for it. Basically, you enable a mouse emulator where it assigns the X and Y axes of the mouse to the X and Y for the TrackIR. This essentially turns your head into a mouse.

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For regular FPS-type action, frankly, this device was not useful. We spent a lot of time tweaking the sensitivities for the X and Y axes, and still never quite got them right. We would also lose perspective many times because the detector would lose one of the emitters on the TrackClip headset. We’d be staring at the sky, or the ground, or even spinning in circles (a very dizzying effect). However, if you’re going to be stationary, say as a sniper or a gunner on a vehicle, the headset becomes just a bit more practical. Note that we did not say efficient or convenient, as a mouse is still probably the best tool for the job here. The headset doesn’t quite have the sensitivity that a mouse does.

Where you will get some use out of it is if you’re piloting a vehicle of some kind. Starting with Battlefield 2, if you click Ctrl while you move your mouse around, you get a “free look” at your surroundings. If you’re using the TrackIR, you can click Ctrl and accomplish the same thing. Again, this doesn’t give you any more functionality over a mouse, but it allows you to “get your head in the game,” as the company slogan goes.

You can take a look at this device’s use in this title in the video below.

GTR 2 (Demo)

We wanted to take a look at a racing game, but Need For Speed didn’t support free POV. We looked at the free demos on Natural Point’s site and saw GTR 2. It won some awards last year and was one of the newer games in the list. This title is definitely for the racing enthusiast crowd. It’s well-designed with some meticulous detail given in some areas, but we wouldn’t actually call the game all that fun. It’s quite difficult and definitely requires some skill on the part of the driver.

We checked out the TrackIR’s functionality in the game and were rather impressed. We just wish there was more to look at. The driver’s seat was fairly empty and since we were constantly crashing or running off-road, there wasn’t a lot to look at out the windows. You can enable “Real” mirrors in the game so that your side and rear-view mirrors actually render the reflection. As you change your position in the car by moving back and forth or side to side, the reflection changes, which is a very cool feature.

Flight Simulator X

We thought that this title would be the butter on the proverbial bread for Natural Point. Unfortunately, with the side-mounted TrackClip array, it was a disaster. When our view wasn’t completely catawampus, we were having to constantly re-center our device. The software was not detecting our head motion correctly at all and it was immensely frustrating.

We decided to give the top-mounted reflector bracket a try. Lo-and-behold, it worked famously. Only when we turned really far did it have some problems holding onto our IR signal, say, when we were trying to look out the back of our plane or see if our stewardess had brought our coffee yet.

A strong proviso about this title, however. The TrackIR works best if you’re in “Virtual Cockpit” mode, as it becomes your eyes in the plane. If you switch to normal “Cockpit” view, your head becomes the mouse and you start to yaw and pitch the plane with your head. This is unfortunate in a sense because the detail and resolution of the cockpit is much better in normal “Cockpit” view. In the “Virtual Cockpit,” you can definitely see all of the devices and even read the gauges, but details like the switch labels are obscured and you have to mouse over them to see what they say.

General Usage

Unlike Natural Point’s SmartNAV system, this device isn’t really intended for general use applications. If you enable the mouse emulation console, then you essentially turn the device into a mouse, but it isn’t completely hands-free as you still have to assign the mouse click functions to something on your keyboard.

For this reason, this device ostensibly becomes a “novelty” item. Its only true practical use is in gaming, and it’s not really adding a ton of functionality to your experience. Rather, it’s replacing functions usually assigned to other controls to make POV perspective changes easier and more immersive for the player. That may absolutely be worth the $200 to some folks who are flight simulator or racing enthusiasts, but to the bulk of the gaming community, it’s not a “must-have” item.