
Show HN: Seamless head tracking for games using the TrueDepth camera (iOS) - epaga
http://www.inflightassistant.com/smoothtrack/index.html
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jasonpeacock
I'm sure I'm missing something as I have no experience with these
tools/software....

When you turn your head to the right, the screen _in front of you_ shows the
view to the right but now you're facing to the right and you can't see the
screen in front of you anymore?

How do you setup your battlestation to best use this?

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evan_
I was wondering this as well. In the video he turns his head about 20° or 30°
and the view shifts almost 90°, so it must amplify his motions? I suppose you
would get used to that pretty quickly.

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rspicer
Yes. OpenTrack has user-editable Bézier curves that map real-world translation
and rotation to what’s output to the game.

This is an awesome hack and I wish I’d thought of it.

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rco8786
OHHHH that's brilliant

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Animats
Nintendo 3DS doing that, 2010: [1]

The "big window" form of this (2012) is especially cool.[2]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUC5JJCxx5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUC5JJCxx5k)

[2] [https://youtu.be/V2hxaijuZ6w](https://youtu.be/V2hxaijuZ6w)

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mcphage
It never worked very well on the DSi—which is a shame, since I really liked
the game that used it (Looksley's Line Up). The DSi camera is really low
resolution (0.3 Megapixel). I've never seen it ported anywhere else, and I
don't know if any emulators will run it. (It will run on the 3DS, but the
camera is in a different place, and the camera placement is pretty essential
to how the game works).

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epaga
Update: I've got a version working on any iOS 13 device - here's a free public
beta link if anyone would like to join
[https://testflight.apple.com/join/ytc1tAdA](https://testflight.apple.com/join/ytc1tAdA)

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epaga
This has been a fun project - moving the camera around in games like Flight
Simulator simply by slightly moving your head is really immersive. Not quite
VR, but good enough! Happy to answer any questions.

(Coming soon - a version that will run without a TrueDepth camera.)

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ChicagoBoy11
I love projects like this. It's such an elegant and in hindsight immediately
obvious solution that it definitely stops you in your tracks. Will try it this
weekend with FS2020; certainly a good stop-gap until they implement native VR.

Can you perhaps elaborate a bit on what the process was like getting some of
that info through the iOS APIs and then exposing it through UDP for the PC?
Any interesting snags you hit along the way?

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epaga
Thanks!

For me, and this surprised me a bit, the most frustrating parts actually
weren’t any of the APIs but just plain old network headaches - it took me a
bit to figure out the UDP protocol OpenTrack needs, but then it was often
struggling with it not connecting or working only to 10 minutes later realize
I had switched my phone‘s WiFi off while testing.

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locusm
Given the TrackIR product is more than $400 here in Australia this looks like
a great alternative.

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Rebelgecko
If you're feeling brave, you can either build your own TrackIR (basically
super glue a few LEDs to a hat). IIRC you can also use OpenTrack with a
regular USB webcam

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lostmsu
There was a project from Google just a few weeks ago, that is able to figure
out position of irises with good precision using a web cam:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/i5mbdm/r_e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/i5mbdm/r_eyes_on_me_google_ai_mediapipe_iris_improves/)

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mikhuang
This looks a lot more comfortable than wearing a QR code on my head. Is there
expected to be a lot of accuracy difference between a TrueDepth cam and a
regular cam?

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theNJR
Whoa. I was about to spend the cash on hardware to support this in MSFS2020.
Can’t wait to try.

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chrischen
Is there any way to get this to work with spatial audio instead? I bought a
$99 device that adds head tracking aiming to simulate surround sound audio by
tracking my head movement, but they no longer support their software and it's
super buggy!

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nxpnsv
Looks awesome. I guess no mac games supports FreeTrack?

