In many simulations situational awareness is the key between being able to complete a task successfully, be it shooting down an enemy in air to air combat, or a quick check over your shoulder to see if there's another car in your blind spot. Simulating the ability to look around and keep situational awareness, has always been something that has been done half arsed at best, through the use of keystrokes, mouse or joystick hats.

What if you could make it natural?

This is what TrackIR achieves.

What is TrackIR?
TrackIR is a 2 part solution to the age old SA in sims problem. A hardware device to track your head movements and a software component that translates this head movement into data an application can use to pan your view in a simulation. A frequently asked question runs along the lines of "but if I turn my head how can I still see the monitor?". The answer is simple - it's scaled. Rotate your head so that your nose is pointing to the side of your monitor. That's as far as you have to move your head to look behind you in a simulation. Coupled with a deadzone for the wobbly necked, it all works out.

The Hardware:

The hardware component consists of the TrackIR unit itself, in a clear casing and flexible metal stand. Inside the unit are IR emitters and the sensor to detect and process their reflection. An LED on the top notifies whether the unit is tracking an IR source (whether reflective or active) and a blue LED lights up the clear case if the software component has detected a 'TrackIR Enhanced' application running.

The hardware is in it's third generation. The original TrackIR, whilst providing the functionality it was supposed to had a few issues.

The Sofware:

The version 4 software is a great improvment upon the earlier versions. Supporting autoloading of profiles dependant on what simulation is running, streamlined the tasks of configuring the resulting panning movement in sim, and for the first time, provides the user with a way to judge how their head movement translates to the simulation.

What is trackIR enhanced?
Naturalpoint supplies an SDK to developers to allow them to hook into the TrackIR unit as a discreet device and communicate with it directly. In these games, the TrackIR is treated as its own separate input for controlling the game's point of view (separate from "mouse-look" and other controllers).

Current enhanced games include:
Aces High
Battle of Britain
Combat Flight Simulator 3
Enemy Engaged : RAH-66 Comanche vs. KA-52 Hokum
F1 Challenge
Falcon 4.0 Allied Force
MS Flight Simulator 2004 : A Century Of Flight
IL2 Sturmovik : Forgotten Battles
Live For Speed
LOCK ON : Modern Air Combat
Micro Flight
Pacific Fighters
Richard Burns Rally
Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed
Warbirds 2004
WWII Online
X-Plane / X-Cockpit

An up to date list can be found here

Minimum System Requirements:
Windows 2000, or Windows XP
Pentium 800
Five (5) megabytes of free hard disk space
128 megabytes of RAM
USB connection
Microsoft DirectX 8.0 or higher.

Installation:
The TrackIR package includes the tracker unit, a flatpanel mounting kit, a sheet of reflective stickers of various sizes, a driver cd and a quickstart guide. A BIG thanks to Naturalpoint for not putting it in the tamperproof plastic packaging you need a chainsaw to get through. The package can be used to store your unit when you are travelling with it.

Inserting the cd begins driver installation, prompting you along the way. The whole process is simple, but if you somehow manage to bugger it up, the troubleshooting information on the website, coupled with the technical support forum on their site should have you up and running very quickly. From browsing the tech support forum I can see that Naturalpoint staff responses to posts is quick during normal business hours, with replies often within the hour. I haven't seen a response that was rude or insulting, even when the original poster may have been. A touch of class which is becoming less and less common.

First impressions:
At first I was a struck by the scope of options available in the interface. I could see that it may be a little scary to the technically challenged, but very quickly the logic of the layout and the task centric flow becomes apparent which makes configuration a breeze after some initial orientation.

Use:
I start up the software component (which is very light on processing requirements, about 2% CPU utilisation), set the keys I want to toggle the tracking on/off and the key to centre view - both of which I have bound to buttons on my CH Pro Throttle. I launch IL2 and the TrackIR unit glows blue, confirming that it is now communicating with the sim in enhanced mode - such a simple thing but one that helps in troubleshooting if you are experiencing problems. The green LED on the top of the unit tells me that it is tracking the IR reflector, in this case a Trackhat - a baseball cap with a reflective strip on the bill and one at the back if you prefer to wear it backwards.

Jumping onto an online IL2 server, I select an FW-190 fighter and spawn into the game. Starting the engine I take a quick look left and right to see if there is anyone nearby and to find the runway.

Taxiing I keep a look out for other aircraft, hold short and check left and right for landing aircraft. All is clear and I taxi onto the runway.

Throttling up I take off and continue to look around as I climb out. I take note of the sun's position and begin a fast climb around the airfield while keeping my head on a swivel watching for other aircraft. Left to Right, Up, right to left, check instruments and course, and repeat.

Before long I spot a single contact, and move upsun from him. I look about quickly and spot another two contacts, higher and far away travelling the same direction as the initial. Too far away to help the first contact.I approach undetected from his high 7, take a quick look left and right to make sure I am clear then drop to his dead six closing fast on his spitfire.

I aim at his left wing and fire a one second burst that tears it off and sends him hurtling to the ground. Another quick look around and I spot only one of the two other contacts I am expecting. Aa quick search for the other finds him and I can see that they've split to engage me from both sides. I move head on to one that is diving towards me, line up at a kilometre away, begin opening fire with a one second burst at 600 metres and push forward on the stick, to see his cannon rounds go over my cockpit as mine impact with his engine. As he flashes past me I turn my head and can see that his engine is smoking. A quick tail check shows me his wingman is trying to catch up to me, no chance. Full throttle, 80% pitch, unload and I leave him in the dust.

Without using a TrackIR, keeping situational awareness in this situation would have been difficult. By giving effortless ability to look in any direction quickly I could maintain SA, make a decision on my tactics, execute them without fumbling around with a hat or buttons.

Conclusion:
I simply do not play sims for fun that don't support TrackIR anymore. To me it would be like going back to controlling my plane with a keyboard. The unit is inexpensive, has no moving parts and is likely to last a long time. It adds so much to SA it's almost cheating.

If you have an older version, is it worth upgrading?

The first issue that I had experienced with the original TrackIR was the inability to track properly when there was background IR noise, be it sunlight, reflective surfaces within LOS of the unit, or IR emmitting appliances. To get around this issue I had to rearrange my home office so that I had a nice blank wall behind me. This generation of unit deals with these issues in a couple of ways. The first is to provide a sensitivity filter, much like a radio squelch, that allows you to set the unit to ignore IR returns below a selected intensity. The second is the ability to set size paramaters that the reflective source has to fulfill before it is used as the tracking reference.

The second problem was the tracking action itself in simulations. The low sample rate resulted in panning that while reasonably smooth, could sometimes result in jerkyness. Not a big deal but one that sometimes interfered with the immersion of the user. The sample rate of this unit is twice that of the original, from 60FPS to 120FPS, and the sensor resolution has increased by 67% from 60K to 101K dpi.

Trackir is simply a MUST have if you are into simulations. It receives and editor's choice award since this editor could not enjoy simulations without it.