TrackIR 5 Head Tracking System – 6DOF USB Optical Motion Tracker for PC Gaming – Natural Head Movement Camera for Flight, Racing & Combat Simulators – Windows Compatible by NaturalPoint

A friend of mine bought one of these and I got to try it out first before I bought mine. I was sold on it immediately.For my purposes, I currently use it for Microsoft Flight Simulator and Warthunder. It's ridiculously easy to set up, just plug it in, download the software, then grab a hat to attach the hat clip and you're good to go. It works seamlessly with the games, all you have to do is open the TrackIR software first before you open the game. I didn't have to change any settings or anything, literally plug and play interface.What I like about this is that you have awareness of your surroundings vs being blind to everything around you in VR. It's a lot more convenient, a lot less intrusive in PC resources, not to mention a fifth of the cost.Wherever you move your head, it follows, and it's VERY accurate and smooth. For those of you that like to fly tail-draggers like I do, this allows you to open the canopy and stick your head out to see past the nose of the aircraft when taxiing. Not to mention be able to look around and find all your switches for startup procedures.10/10 would definitely recommend.

Works great. After a couple hours researching and getting the information together, I was able to install this program called LinuxTrack onto my Macbook pro, move a file or two around, and that was it really. You can fine tune the sensitivities to your liking in the LinuxTrack program, and then go into X plane 10 and use it. You do not need to check the "trackir5" box in the devices tab inside the Xplane 10 game. That wasn't necessary for me. Trackir5 has 3 functions once inside X plane 10, and you will need to assign them to 3 different buttons on your keyboard before the Trackir5 will start to work in the game. The 3 buttons are Pause, Recenter, and the other is simple the on/off switch of the head tracking device. You will be using the recenter button all the way, so I made it my space bar which is convenient. The on/off button will be used quite a bit too which just allows you to go back and forth in-game between using the head tracking, and not using it. I've found that when using just a single 27 inch monitor, the utility of this head tracking device is OK, but not what I really hoped for. Definitely still useful in some areas though. You have to set the sensitivities really low, or else you will be just jumbling the screen around quite a bit. If you have any flight radios, multi panels, switch panels etc., anything that causes you to lean forward and off to the left or right during in game use of the trackir5, the screen will obviously follow your head, and it can get a little aggravating sometimes. I find that I only turn on the tracking device when I'm taxing on runways, mid-flight to look around a little, or when I'm doing a VFR landing and I want to look to my left while flying downwind parallel to the runway. The biggest smile that I get from using trackir5 is when I'm able to just sit up tall in my seat and look up over the dash to get a better view of the approaching runway. That is really nice and convenient to be able to do that while your hands are on a yoke and throttle quadrant. Other than that though I don't use it too much. It comes with the hat clip, which I taped on top of a pair of good headphones and it seemed to work OK. I bought the track clip pro made by trackir. I can't say for sure if it actually works better than the hat clip or not, but it clips right on the side of my headphones now which is 10 times better than taping the hat clip to headphones. Overall it's still great and I'm glad that I bought it because it definitely has its place even with a single monitor. If you have budget limitations though, and using a single monitor, I would recommend putting this at the bottom of the list when considering flight yoke, throttles, radios, etc. Just my opinion. Good luck.

The TrackIR 5 system gives the user a refined, packaged product. It works as advertised and will not disappoint you. You may regret the purchase only because of its current expense, but you will be getting the best for any driving or flight simulator. Its primary technical advantage is the high framerate and precision of the black-and-white infrared camera, 120 FPS, with limited computer resources consumed. That is why a webcam and some free tracking software are an inferior solution for precise head-tracking; until webcam technology and prices improve, low-end webcams cannot give the same performance.TrackIR can detect changes in the orientation of the tracking clip of hundredths of degrees, and millimeters of spatial movement: less than what a human brain would readily perceive. You may alter the subsequent math and functions of the raw input for use in your program. If you take half an hour to customize and fine-tune the default settings included with TrackIR, you adapt the technology to you, not you to the technology.It's not as though you need to track your head, either. Put it on your foot, or put it on your swivel chair, or put it on your cat if you trust her to help you play. You can pause tracking at any time with a simple hotkey.It is partially because of its actual precision that NaturalPoint has intentionally limited its usefulness outside of the pre-defined supported games and generic "Mouse Emulation" executable which attempts to give basic mouse emulation for programs not officially supported but which will not allow usage of the mouse in non-games. The TrackIR hardware and software are, however, technically capable of full emulation for a desktop mouse or a joystick, but the methods of implementing this present something of a moral dilemma: adapting the TrackIR system into a general-use mouse means that NaturalPoint's much more expensive head-tracking package for the disability market is much less attractive and exclusive (e.g. for someone unable to use an ordinary optical mouse), but so severely limiting the system's function means that casual buyers are restricted from using their purchase to its full potential.So, if someone were to use TrackIR and some programmable input emulation software for the purpose of adapting TrackIR into a device usable in any situation with its full, ultra-precise "6 degrees of freedom", then I suppose that's "hacking" in the hobbyist sense of the word, but it would be an affront to the engineers and investors who put so much work and money into developing TrackIR into the wonderful gaming controller that it is.Yet, TrackIR is capable of so much more if only the tools to do these things were available as part of the proprietary package. TrackIR is to head-tracking as Microsoft Windows is to operating systems: you get a good, polished product that tends to work, but nerds complain on the internet about how closed it is. It's like buying a car and discovering that its maximum speed is governed to never exceed the speed limit, and then one day you open up the hood and see the governor laxly tied on with a "do not remove" sign. You paid for it. What you do is up to you.