I’ve been using the SmoothTrack App plus an iPhone 11 for almost half a year now for head tracking. I used the “Head Tracker” app before but felt SmoothTrack to be, well, smother…
However, due to the wireless connection there is a noticeable lag. The iPhone camera also seems to work best in a fully lid room. This makes night flying kind of impossible with head tracking. So I wonder if it’s worth throwing money at the problem and switch to Tobii Eye Tracker.
Does the iPhone version allow USB tethering like on Android? This will help latency some.
Unfortunately that won’t help lack of light. I was surprised that it did still work ok even in dim lighting, but nothing would beat active IR in that situation.
The iPhone can be connected to your PC via USB to decrease the latency while using SmoothTrack (Setup instructions are here https://smoothtrack.app/ ) For me it makes a nice difference.
Also, I pretty much only fly during the night at home so I bought this desk lamp (Amazon.ca) . This allows me to keep the main lights in my basement off but still use the lamp to have just enough light to keep the room relatively dim but enough to work for SmoothTrack.
Smooth track is a great, low cost option and works surprisingly well. Tobii is more convenient though and offers noticeably better tracking in all lighting conditions.
I had a different experience. Started with Tobii. Eye tracking was not useful for flight sim, the head tracking was. However the head tracking only worked effectively about 50% of the time, possibly due to distance, height etc.
I enjoyed the whole tracking experience enough I bought the EDTracker and never looked back. However EDTracker can’t be purchased anymore, so I’d personally be looking at the Grassmonkey Puck or Track IR.
Yup, Tobii isn’t really impacted by lighting conditions but distance from the screen is. It’s also worth angling the Tobii unit so when seated as normal, you can see the two faint IR sensors fully as this makes a big different to reliability. It’s been rock solid for me but it might not work for everyone’s set up.
Thanks. Good to know it works on larger screens. One other thing. With Smoothtrack you can look over the front of the airplane as well as side and down, getting a good visual of the runway on the downwind. With Smoothtrack you can get more than 90 degrees view, including the rear of the cabin. Can Tobii give you that? in other words, does it track just your eyes or can it also track head movement.
It will track head rotation, not movement. You can effectively look over your shoulder, will need to check in the morning if you can get a full 360 degrees.
It won’t track head movement in the sim at the moment though so you can’t move your head to the side to look down onto the runway, all viewing is done from a fixed point.
Yes, you can look in any direction and if you are close to the side window then you can look down at the runway. The issue is you can’t lean left or right and then look down using Tobii alone - that is why I bound camera pov to a hat so I can move around as needed.
I went back and forth and decided to stick with the iPhone + SmoothTrack + OpenTrack solution until Tobii gets 6 DOFs. It’s not perfect but good enough for now, at least for me.