FreeTrack Forum

Hi.  I just found this project and it seems very cool.  I do have a question about how applicable this would be to my setup.  I fly FSX and Allied force on my HTPC driving a 60" Sony SXRD display.  It works great, but I'd love to have some headtracking capability.

How far can the led assembly on my head be from the camera and still work well?  I usually am about 6 feet from the display when I game.  Is that too far?  What webcam would you recommend for this application?

If that's too far, is there a setting in free track that would reverse the inputs?  that is, I could put my led hat on backwards, and have the camera behind me for tracking, and that could be at a closer distance to a camera that would be setting behind me...

thanks in advance...

mike

I've never tried that long a distance, but my guess is that it would work, so long as your LEDs are bright enough and you use an adequate visible light filter on your webcam (for example a piece of what's inside a floppy disk). You'll probably have to turn the sensitivity up quite a bit though. I'll give it a go when I get home from work.

Putting your cap on back to front is a great idea, but I've never thought of that nor heard of anyone who's done it. I've not seen an option to reverse the movements, sorry.. maybe an idea for a future release..?

Your main problems are going to be :

- tracking :

Your leds will have to be bright enough and big enough to be seen correctly by the webcam

- accuracy :

Using a "normal" distance, a head movement is translated as dot movements on the webcam field.
The bigger the dot movement, the better the accuracy.

Since you plan to use FT at a greater distance, and unless your webcam has an optical zoom, a given head movement will produce a smaller dot movement than the same movement at normal distance, thus less accuracy.

In extreme cases , your system could not perceive small head movements, even with increased axis sensitivity.


As usual with freetrack, try it, test it, tweak it  until it works as wanted

cya