A couple of years ago i stumbled over this device called Track-IR, a infrared camera with built in image processor and infrared illuminator which picks up the movement of 3 reflectors on a clip you attach to a baseball cap, or in the pro version a clip with 3 leds you simply snap onto your headphones, translating that head movement information to head movements of your ingame view in 6 axes.

this is quite usefull for games using controls like joysticks..steering wheels but it can be even quite helpful in MilSims like ARMA2

the following video from TIR explains track-ir in a nutshell

this one is the latest version of the track-ir sensor , track-ir5, on the back it has a window that let you take a look onto their quite powerfull image processing chip which takes load from your computers cpu so you wont get framerate drops from the software having to calculate the positions of the leds on your head itself.

the camera delivers a raw resolution of 355×288 with about 120 frames per second and sets you back about 160-200 $ last time ive checked. fancy little thing, just a bit to expensive, so ive looked around for alternatives.

There is this little software called FREE-Track, which lets you use a software calculated approach on head motion tracking using regular webcams

 

sweet..webcams are cheap, but their technical specs usualy move around between resolutions of 320×240 and 640×480 and framerates not exceeding 30 frames per second, cameras with higher resolutions or framerates can be quite expensive and additionaly you still do not get pre-processed informations from the webcam, just a raw picture, the freetrack software has to analyze first which adds significant cpu load. you have to mod some cameras by removing their infrared filters so they would pick up the light from the led clip…  blah
nah, it shall be no webcam then. For freetrack i needed something a bit more dedicated to this task, and yet cheap.

standard WiiMote, about 30$

…..batteries included

….keep away from children below the age of 3

sooo.. whats the deal with the wiimote..

Nintendo doesnt really admit that their little gamecontroller has quite some computing power ^^.

it contains a custom PixArt infrared camera exclusively manufactured for nintendo, which is located behind that black window on the front (visible on the right side of the pic), this camera delivers an interpolated image of 1024×768 at 100FPS with a 41° field of view (trackir has 46° thats not bad :o ). additionaly that IR sensor comes with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz :o , awesome..so we got onboard image processing here…

the wiimote connects to the wii via a bluetooth IC from broadcom to transfer the relatively massive data of the accelerometers and the output of the IRsensor

it is using the regular HID bluetooth standard for input devices , so now theres my way to hook it up to my pc ^^

i am using for that a Toshiba bluetooth usb dongle and the bluetooth stack drivers on its cdrom

now for the infrared lights i have to use for my headset clip…..  3 infrared lights go for about 5$ or something…  i was to lazy to go to a electronics store and just grabbed a

wireless Wii “sensor bar” for 9$ which really just contains 2 IR led light sources so the wiimote camera can pick those up, plus a handy power switch..

but when i took it apart at home ive found 3 leds on each side of the device, 6 IRleds and a power switch for just 9$ sweet… so i can even build a 4 led clip now ^^ .

for now ive just used one of the leds, on the tip of a ballpoint pen ive taped onto the top of my headset, relatively far on the front, just enough not to get into my field of view, to make it easier for the camera to pick up the motion of it, this setup gives me 2 axis of freedom … up, down, left , right , enough for a test. i sync´ed the wiimote with my bluetooth dongle, launched freetrack, and selected as camera source the nintendo HID device.

awesome.. it worked instantly, the the processed red dot of the led on the camera image was visible, and it already got tracked by the software :o

ive adjusted some sensivity settings in the preview window and launched ARMA2 right away, could not wait any longer to see it work ingame.

ive chosen a helicopter training mission, because thats what troubled me the most in that game, being unable to see whats going on left and right , and on the landings i always chopped off

trees with my rotors…

what you can not hear in the video is me saying stuff like “whoa…whoa, thats friggen awesome…”   every 20 seconds or so  XD

almost perfect landing..
sooo…  the price for this rig was roughly about 60$ with additional batteries and other work materials…
i´m making a note here

–huge success–