TrackIR 4 Pro

By Andrew Herd (23 February 2006)

egular readers will be aware of my lack of enthusiasm for Flight Simulator's virtual cockpit (VC). My reasons for this are: first, VCs aren't as easy to use as 2D panels, largely because of the problem of having to pan around and move the viewpoint back and forth to find gauges; second, although there are exceptions to the rule, VC graphics are rarely as good as their 2D counterparts, leading to blocky glareshields and angular cockpit structures; and third, using a hat switch on a joystick to look around the virtual world is as about as unreal as it gets. In a real airplane, if you wanna find something, you turn your head to look for it - assuming that swivelling your eyeballs hasn't found it for you already. By contrast, in Flight Simulator and every other flying game I have ever come across, you use your thumb to look for stuff and it just ain't natural, Martha, y'hear? You might call me an old reactionary, but I say that using your thumb to look for stuff is contrary to nature and since there is no man that can prove to me otherwise, I declared years ago that virtual cockpits and everything that went with them were worse than mischief, so pass me some more of that Wild Turkey while I crank a couple of shells in this here shotgun and you barricade the doors against anyone who might be thinking of comin' around a whoopin' and a hollering to persuade us otherwise.

So there.

Well, I recant. I admit that I was wrong and that there is a use for virtual cockpits and furthermore it sat for a week in a box outside my office being kicked around before it occurred to me that there might be anything useful in it. Then I got several emails all at once asking if I had a copy of TrackIR and I was about to say no, when the penny dropped and I took a look in the box.

While I unload the gun and you lever off the planks we nailed over the windows to prevent the voice of reason getting to us, it might be worth doing a little pocket psycho-analysis to let you understand why I have never used TrackIR in the past. I have been using flight simulators for a very long time and it just so happens that I have gotten into the habit of assuming things should work a certain way when I use them; a comfortable set of assumptions that showed its first cracks when I did a review of Lock-On Modern Air Combat for another magazine and discovered it was almost impossible to play the game effectively using Thumb Look ™ unless you enjoyed being blown to pieces on a regular basis. Believe it or not, TrackIR was around way before then, but for various reasons I didn't consider it, not least because of my belief that one day I would forget to uninstall the reflective spot TrackIR compelled me to stick on the end of my nose when I went down to answer the front doorbell. Call me old fashioned, but I like the postman to think I am reasonably normal, more fool him, and reflective nose dots can cause questions. Another delusional idea of mine was that the TrackIR device weighed about four pounds and would have to be stuck on top of my monitor using at least six rolls of gaffertape (back in those days we all had CRT monitors, remember those?), which did have a grain of truth in it, since the device was by no means small and NaturalPoint hadn't got the attachment system figured out as well as they have now.

Add in the usual amounts of fear, uncertaintly and doubt and you will understand why the box in the hall couldn't have a TrackIR inside it, because it was (a) too small and (b) didn't weigh enough. In fact, if you bounced it in your hand, the box didn't appear to have anything in it at all. So it stayed on the floor until the dog tripped over it and Barbara moved it onto my desk, on top of a pile of other stuff I probably ought to open, only no-one has sent me emails about them, so I confine myself to watching the stack out of the corner of my eye with a finger near the trigger in case it tries anything.

So finally, when the combined voices of Nels Anderson, Mike DeCastro and Patrick Hewitt (from NaturalPoint) reached the kind of volume even I could not igore, I opened the box.

There was a baseball hat in it.

In another life, I work in a job where people send us advertising stuff all the time, hats being the least of it, and I was just about to drop-kick the package out of the window when I it rattled a little and it dawned on me there might be something else in there besides a hat. So I chucked out the hat - don't do this - and pulled out one of those transparent plastic packages containing a tiny little black thing that resembled a robot spider more than anything else, except it was designed better, a thin piece of strangely-shaped metal you can see above right, and a CD. I have to admit that I stared at the spider for a long time, because if this was a TrackIR, it was a lot smaller and smarter than I had previously given it credit. The sensor itself is just under an inch high and just over two inches wide (2.5 x 5 cm) and I have come across heavier feathers; but despite its lightness, the device is well built. The shapes you can see projecting out sideways under the base of the sensor are the legs, which can be rotated and opened to allow the TrackIR to sit on top of a monitor. I have a Dell LCD screen and the sensor hasn't shifted from the place I first put it.

Setting the beast up is no problem, as a great deal of thought has gone into the device since its previous incarnation and that was pretty good in itself. All you have to do is put the CD in a drive, install the software and plug the sensor into a USB port. Such written instructions as there are, are brief, but there is an extensive help file which advises plugging the TrackIR into either a powered USB hub, or a port on the computer itself. I second the idea of not using an unpowered hub, because a lot of data passes through the sensor, and unpowered hubs have an annoying habit of losing packets. Unfortunately, some powered hubs aren't that much better and given that my graphics tablet declines to work half the time unless it is connected to a port physically located on the PC, I did a bit of rearranging so that my TrackIR could be set up the same way. Next, I retrieved the hat and slipped the metal shape over it, thinking it was a deal better than using a stick-on dot, although I still believe it might raise the postman's eyebrows - maybe not by much, but some.

Using TrackIR couldn't be much simpler, as at the basic level all you have to do is to start the TrackIR applet, fire up the game you want to play (there is a list of compatible ones on the NaturalPoint website), put on the hat and get going. As long as TrackIR has a profile installed for the game you are intending to play, the appliet will automatically load it and will be active without further intervention. After a deal of thought, I decided to run with the RealAir Spitfire in FS2004, on the basis that TrackIR only works with Flight Simulator's virtual cockpit and the Spit is not only tough to fly well, but has one of the best VCs I have ever come across, so it seemed a good combination. I had just been sent a copy of Visual Flight's Scotflight 2.1 scenery, so it was natural to load the plane at Cumbernauld - Scotland's most boring airport - and give it a whirl.

Over the years I have developed a lot of bad habits using Flight Simulator. Of the ones it is safe to discuss on a family-oriented website, the worst is slouching down in my chair, leaning at strange angles as I try to drink tea at the same time as I negotiate controlled airspace. I only do this because you can't easily do that in the real world and one of the great freedoms of simulations is that you can drink anything you like while you are in charge of a plane.

You are going to have to trust me, but my tea went cold and I never got to slouch, because from the moment I got the tail of the Spit up and realised I was still tracking the centerline, I was hooked. With TrackIR running, I found I could move my point of view (POV) back just by moving my head a little until I could see the two triangles of runway you need to have in view to keep a taildragger straight. Turning my head let me judge my distance from the edge of the tarmac and when the tail came up, I instinctively glanced down to check the airspeed and a second later, we were flying and I dabbed the brakes before raising the gear. The weather was horrible, so after checking for traffic I went onto instruments, ready for a climb through the cloud and we broke through on an easterly heading at around three thousand feet. The view, left and right, was incredible - and after a few joyous loops and rolls, which were a revelation, thanks to my new-found ability to use my head to look around, an idea occurred to me. The vis was bad enough that I might just get away with it... but you'll have to watch the video to see that.

TrackIR 4 Pro works by using infra-red light to decode your head movements and translate them into realistic changes in the POV in a game. Seeing this done for the first time is a fascinating, as the cap and wire frame are so light that you quickly forget you are wearing them and the new found ability to look around takes on a magical dimension. The frame has three reflectors mounted on it, which allow TrackIR 4 Pro a 46 degree field of view and the product works extremely well as long as there isn't too much ambient light in the room, in which case the driver supplied on the installation CD was liable to go into a periodic sulk after generating a 'no data' message on the applet. When TrackIR dropped out like this, nothing dramatic happened to the game other than that I ended up being left with Thumb Look ™ as my only method of changing the POV, however, the significant problem was that when I suffered this particular type of 'no data' drop out and wanted to get TrackIR working in the sim again, the only way to do so was to pull the sensor's USB plug out and then stick it back in again so that the computer could redectect it, a process which destroyed the entire flow of the flight. Deleting the original driver and installing version 4.1 build 28 seems to have fixed the problem - but note that I had to completely uninstall the original software using control panel to get this to work - installing over the top of it didn't fix the problem.

The basic operation of TrackIR is extremely simple. When the PC is turned on, but the TrackIR applet isn't running, the face of the sensor is dark, with a dim red light at the top and a blue light intermittently flashing at the bottom - this can be a little distracting if the sensor is mounted too near your line of sight. With the applet running, the blue light disappears and a group of four dim red lights appear below the top one; put the hat on and the top light goes green; fire up a TrackIR compatible sim and the bottom light comes on and stays on. After that, all you have to do is look in the direction you want to see.

Most simmers will have to make a few changes to the way they sit when they are using TrackIR, purely because of the mechanics of the way the thing works. Life is a whole deal simpler if you start with your chair, yoke/joystick and the sensor lined up with one another, although for what it is worth, it doesn't matter if this line isn't exactly at right angles to the screen. Once TrackIR, you and the game are all synced up and running, you can move your head around freely, thanks to the sensor's generous field of view, but one catch is that after it has detected your initial head position, moving your head left or right relative to the screen moves the POV with it - with hilarious results in my case, since I have a wheeled office chair and have gotten used to sliding it around the floor to get comfortable. When I absent-mindedly kicked the chair sideways to get a better grip on my joystick while flying the Spit, my point of view in the game slid left and I ended up with my virtual head somewhere out over the port wing - giving me a view which real Spitfire drivers would kill to have on approach, but which isn't totally realistic - so I learned to keep my chair still. The other compromise most simmers will have to make is to slow their head movements down a little, because TrackIR doubles or triples your head's angular rotation, allowing your virtual POV to look at right angles when your head is only turned about 30 degrees - if you think about the mechanics of the thing, if the software didn't do this, when your head was turned to ninety degrees, you wouldn't be able to see the screen! Another good reason for slowing your lateral head movement down a little is that if you don't, you will puke, because having the screen view swimming drunkenly around in front of you all the time is not good for the balance mechanism.

Vertical head movement has an entirely different 'feel' to it, which puzzled me for a while, before the solution dawned on me. In a real plane, when you want to check the airspeed, you naturally glance down without moving your head - but even if TrackIR could mimic this, a realistic cockpit POV puts the airspeed indicator off-screen and the only way to bring it into view is to tip your head down in order to see the middle and lower parts of the panel. This is the one time that using TrackIR feels anything other than totally intuitive, although I got used to it fairly quickly.

In addition to being able to look left and right and up and down - wait for this - if you take your head backwards and forwards, the screen POV changes with the movement, so it is possible, for example, to see more panel real estate simply by moving your head backward. Tipping your head on its side makes the visuals rotate the opposite way, just as they would in reality, and just as I began to get really frustrated trying to see the compass in the Spit, it dawned on me that I could see over the top of the stick by leaning forward and looking down. To say the effect is uncanny when you see it for the first time is a serious understatement. The flip side is that unless you have a particularly still head, the POV jiggles just enough to make adjusting gauges a challenge - the solution being either to load a profile that has a null central zone, or to edit one of the existing profiles to incorporate such a thing. Should for any reason you end up with your virtual head position off the cockpit centerline, hitting F12 in the game will center it again and TrackIR will calculate all its movements relative to that point from then on - it is also possible to move the POV about using the FS2004 VC POV controls, which I have linked up to the rockers on my CH Pro yoke. And if you have problems with the rate of rotation that TrackIR produces on screen, there are endless ways of altering it using the applet, right down to tweaking the actual response curves using the graphical editor NaturalPoint supply as part of the TrackIR applet..

Words alone cannot convey the freedom this device brings when you are flying a plane with a virtual cockpit, like the ones in FS2004, CFS3, the IL2 franchise, Lock On, or Falcon 4. Want to know what the cylinder head temp is doing? Just glance down and you can see it. Need to check how much gas you have left? No problem either. Want to know when you are passing the threshold on the downwind leg? Just look out over the wing. Flying a curved approach, as you must in long nosed fighters like the Spit, is a cinch because once you have set up the approach, you can keep one hand on the stick and the other on the throttle, while you take quick downward peeks at the airspeed. Prior to installing TrackIR 4, I had never managed to fly a really satisfactory approach to three-point the Spitfire, but I managed it second attempt with NaturalPoint's magic device running. Equally, if you are into Pacific Fighters or any of the IL2 games, TrackIR revolutionises gameplay by letting you look actively around for opponents, rather than concentrating on the rectangle of screen in front of you. Suddenly, the sky in combat flight sims is a great deal smaller and the maneuver which is so hard to do with Thumb Look ™ - creeping into the blind spot behind and below a bomber, before pulling up and taking it out - becomes child's play because you can keep glancing up as you sneak into place, at the same time as you keep an eye out for people trying to do the same to you. And to my surprise, one of the things TrackIR does is to remove the most of the reasons for having a multi-monitor system, because you can see all you need on a single screen; which is one way you might justify the purchase to your significant other. Failing that, just tell your SO that Andy said you had to buy it.

When I first got TrackIR out of the box, I thought it would be out of my life within the week, but right now I am thinking of glueing the thing on top of my monitor. I have reviewed a lot of product in my time, but I cannot think of another piece of hardware that has made such a difference to my enjoyment of flight simulation.

I have even grown to like the VC - and that is saying something.