Vitrual Pilots and TrackIR

I Know we have a few pilots and a few SIM players on the board and just wanted to share my opinion on this little toy I just got myself.

TrackIR 4

Been playing a few games (BF2 , Lock On) and got tired of loosing track of people who flew past me because I couldn't turn my head and thought that the internet must have an answer.

Lo and Behold

This things AMAZING , Freaky at first but oh so cool

I'm able to look around and target just by looking at something and it had an added bonus.

Got into a tank and became some kind of cyborg tank thing as the turret linked into the TrackIR and aimed wherever I looked independent of my steering.

Spent far too long swinging between giggling and manic evil laughter that is probably healthy

I really recomend anyone who enjoys flight sims or war games to look into this one [/url]

[Stu]

Link didn't really take me anywhere but sign in.
What are you talking about? A VR helmet?

Nope
Ok Fixed the linky I hope.
Should take you to the Track IR4 section on http://www.edimensional.com

Its a little thing that sits ontop of your monitor or desk that looks a little like a web cam.

It tracks your head movement using Infrared and translates it into movement on your computer, either in game view or your mouse.

The link doesn't take you anywhere really, but click List All Products, and you can find what PsychoCannon is talking about.

Basically, a headset that sits in IR light, move your head, and the IR light bounces back at different angles etc. The receiver can then work out where your noggin is pointing, renders this into directional movement compared with the last sample, and instructs the computer to move either the mouse pointer or other looking device (game dependant I'd imagine), and the view is then transmitted back to visor mounted infront of your eyes.

Military helicopters have used over complicated version of this (including constant retina scans - train your eyes to look in different directions at the same time ) for targetting/vision purposes and even weapons selection (even some smaller munitions can do this, hand held stuff, flick between types of ammo just by moving your eyes... nifty!) for quite a long time, nice to see some public application of it too.

surley when you move your head your no longer looking at the screen?

Lol you can set the sensetivity so small movements of your head are turned into larger movements on the screen.

You can get very fidly and set zones and acceleration rates but the defaults work fine for me and I'm now regularly looking around and over my shoulder without even thinking about it

Oh: this link should work

I was hoping that the next -gen consoles may have experimented with VR. Gaming should be away from the joypad stage by now