I always had a feeling it would be counterintuitive and finally I tried it at a friends, and it felt really counterintuitive and somewhat useless. You turn your head but it’s still a screen and you have to look at the screen.
It simply puts your head/eye coordination in a weird and unnatural position. Interesting so many people in flight sim communities seem to use it, what are your opinions if you use it?
Wouldn’t fly without TrackIR.
If you set degree of movement more narrow like 20° and diagonal fov at 90° it is actually pretty good
So what im saying is find your balance by explore settings and when you find comfy save to different profiles.
Offcourse it helps if you have multimonitor setup
Right, I think it could come down to setting it up just right.
Although I do think a good large screen with maybe an additional small screen acting as a sort of EFB feels better to me. Also, maybe because I got used to it but in MSFS the mouse input coupled with some pre-set views really work well.
Another thing could be the quality of the eye tracking system.
Matter of setup, (correct) tuning and usage. It’s not the same story with an improper configuration and flying a Boeing 747 “from the flight deck” clicking on buttons or a long experience TrackIR/Tobbii fine-tuning setup flying slow and low enjoying the landscape.
I believe I’m from the second type of users and after flying 15 years with a TrackIR v4 then v5, and now for 6 month a Tobii users, I can’t fly without it !
Wouldn’t fly without Tobii 5. I’ve done it by accident, forgetting to press the USB switch on the hub it is connected to, and was then bemused when I turned my head to look out the window during taxi, and nothing happened. It becomes second nature very quickly.
I’m a smoothtrack/opentrack user on android, and I could NOT be without it. I use a 43" main screen, and a smaller screen and 2 tablets for instruments.
It’s taken me ages to find the right position for my phone and then the right curves for the settings but I finally got there and it’s a game changer for me and as such a cheap option I love it. No need for extra connections or a sensor on your head to use it like TrackIR.
I highly recommend this as an option.
I know allot of folks have ditched it after multi screen support was added and they now box themselves in with 3 TV’s and remove the need for it.
As mentioned it all comes down to setup as well.
I use Spudknockers DC World profile.
This is like trying on somebody else’s new shoes they’re raving about and concluding that they feel weird, especially compared to your old shoes. In addition to customization for your use case, there’s also an adaptation period before it feels normal. Maybe a few days?
But it’s also totally subjective too. This is how I feel about VR, and I prefer TrackIR over it, while there are so many VR evangelists who “could never go back”.
I’ve got a Tobii eye tracker but TBH I tried it with the sim once and I don’t want to do it again. I have a home cockpit setup and so looking around the virtual cockpit isn’t important for me - I don’t want it to move in any axis other than X axis rotation. It was about being able to quickly look left and right when doing pattern work and on approach, without touching a button / joystick. Like OP, I found it uncomfortable, but I will freely admit that I didn’t find the sim settings for the Tobii to be very intuitive and I gave up and went back to using a hat switch to change views.
And being honest, the whole looking left / right thing while actually facing ahead with a single screen is very sub-optimal. I used to have a 180 degree curved projection screen in my old home cockpit with P3D and I could literally look left and right to see out the left and the right. I can’t really get used to anything else. Once I have the room back to build a 3-large-TV setup I might finally be happy again.
Absolutely can’t stand flying without TrackIR. It was a game-changer for me in terms of being able to maintain visual spatial orientation.
I looked at some videos on them on YT, even a promo video from A320 Sim Pilot where I think he was sponsored. It just doesn’t seem that useful, I find it really weird trying to keep your head and eyes a certain way. Specially with AP on and you are glancing at other things maybe charts on another screen or on anything else on your phone.
Even without the AP, say during an approach and you wanna check something from a chart which is on your phone or Ipad etc. just another screen, you are simply better off without eye/head tracking.
Another one is say you are flying in clouds where you want to follow some of your instruments up close , are you meant to lean in and stay there? Or just stare at a spot trying to keep the camera stable? No, you will probably turn it off and go to a pre assigned view anyway.
There just seems to be so many occasions where it is simply disorienting. It could be most useful while flying low and slow, and maybe in a game like DCS, although I still prefer a mouse there, but other than that i don’t think it couples well with a screen.
I solve the issue and put my Tobii always on and I can use it to unlock my Windows session (Windows Hello)
I just picked up a TrackIR 5 to try it after having previously been down on head-tracking based on a webcam-based solution I tried (I forget which one, opentrack or something?) I agree there’s something not quite natural about the accelerated turning, but that’s the trade-off for not buying three huge monitors.
I expect to want to tweak it a bit – the defaults for TrackIR allow you to look straight behind you with like a 50 degree turn of the head, and in most of the planes I fly there is nothing to see back there. A more modest turning acceleration, and taking some time to get used to it, will probably go a long way.
Overall though I’m very happy with the smoothness of the tracking, and the ability to translate as well as pan makes for easy “lean forward to fiddle with the avionics” – something multi-monitor doesn’t give unless you buy more external widgets to replace all on-screen controls 
The neuralnet tracker input option on the latest version of OpenTrack is really good. I no longer use AI Track with it and have had very good results. I recorded this video a few days ago testing out FSLTL, but you can see the smooth(er) movement in the most recent version.
The main issue with a head tracking is that your view point does not move at a one-to-one ratio like you would in the real world (or VR). That and as you have pointed out you keep your eyes on the screen.
It certainly does not feel very intuitive at first, but you really need to spend some time getting used to how it works and then start tuning it to your personal preferences.
Once you have become accustom to head tracking and put some effort into setting it for you it does actually become very intuitive and natural to use. Certainly for more natural than panning your view with a hat switch or mouse or worse still having a fixed straight-ahead view.
I used TrackIR for at least a decade before I switched to VR and would still go back to head tracking if I had to.
Seriously you guys should try it with multimonitor set up and zoomlevel at 100% from cockpit
Set it up properly and 6 dof small or narrow degree like 20° and diagonal 90° then for the movement a few inhch or cm for the movement like natural turn of your head and yes 10 to 15 % speed freelook in ui msfs
Even in this way when you focus your view turbulence is no trouble
I used a 3+1 screen setup for some time. Used TIR just for looking past the rear edge of the screens. A week after I bought the O+, I took the whole setup down and haven’t looked back.
Had a couple versions of TrackIR and never really used them much… The need to wear the hat or the IR emitters was just annoying (and dorky looking).
Got the Tobii Eye Tracker last year and love it. At default settings it was uncomfortable, but with a little sensitivity adjustment (like, 10 minutes of playing around) I got it to where it feels really intuitive. I have an HP G2 that nothing beats for immersion, but when I don’t feel like donning a headset, or when I’m writing and watching MSFS fly on autopilot in a window on the other side of the screen, the Tobii is fantastic with my ultrawide monitor.
It really is. And users of really big monitors shouldn’t be put off with regard to eye tracking. Eye tracking has a maximum size it can support, but that is not true for head tracking. One of the first things I disabled was eye tracking, as it made looking at, and manipulating small switches, and rotaries all but impossible.