[Thaeris]

Browsing through the FreeFalcon Forums, I came across this article today:

http://www.freefalcon.com/forum/showthread.php?17850-FaceTrackNoIR-head-tracker-without-LED-s

It's mostly debugging up to page #23 of the thread, if you care to read or skim through the posts. That said, up to the announcement of release #5 on page #23:

http://www.freefalcon.com/forum/showthread.php?17850-FaceTrackNoIR-head-tracker-without-LED-s/page23

And, if you do not care to look through any of that at all, here's FaceTrackNoIR's home page on SourceForge - so yes, it's free.   

http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htm

That said, I'm not quite open to installing anything new on my machine just yet, as I'm getting a bit pressed for disk space. However, would anyone here be willing to try it with FS? If possible, this might be a really great piece of software to advocate with projects like Diaspora, given that it works at a satisfactory level. If you've got a webcam, this might really be worth giving a shot.

[qazwsx]

I've just tried this out, after a few tweaks here's what I've found:

Firstly, you'll find that FS needs the TrackIR SCP DLL as mentioned in the 3.6.12 final release thread:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=70692.0

In order to get it working properly, you need to select Fake TrackIR (otherwise FS won't detect the input) as the game protocol and invert the pitch.
Notable limitations: the non-commercial version of the API used limits face tracking to the first camera connected to the system, sorry capture card users.

I found that the default smoothing settings to be too strong, resulting in a high latency between moving my head and getting a response from in game. Personal preference was to move most of the sliders to near minimum values, and to turn EWMA filtering off. (whatever the hell that does)

In terms of system resource usage I could happily play BP2 with no noticeable slowdowns on an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.2Ghz, Nvidia GeForce 8600GT and 2GB of RAM.
CPU usage (out of the game) peaked at about 20% when open and 15% when minimised to system tray.

In terms of gameplay, it feels fantastic, using it gives an incredible feeling of immersion, even more-so when using a "show-ship" .tbm for cockpits.

Put simply, this is Freetrack without the hardware hassle.

[Thaeris]

Thanks for putting this through the paces, qazwsx! I'll need to test this out on my end at some point as well.

[jr2]

nice!

[Herra Tohtori]

Put simply, this is Freetrack without the hardware hassle.

Conversely, however, FreeTrack has its own advantages.

Namely, analysing the image based on three visible dots is computationally much cheaper, resulting in less CPU load as well as reduced latency.

Face tracking on the other hand has other advantages even disregarding all the hardware hassle with FreeTrack, namely that you always have your face about you, while the FreeTrack and TrackIR recuire headgear of some kind (phones, cap, what have you) to mount the dots.

Then there's the fact that when the sun goes up and shines into your room, your IR light source might not be quite powerful enough to ensure good reception of the reflective dots, which can mean that you can't use FreeTrack during daytime while the face tracking would work the best with good lighting conditions.

The CPU load might be a nonfactor anyway as long as you have two or more discrete CPU cores; as long as the face tracking software can handle things on one core with sufficient frame rate, FS2Open would live on the other core. If you only have a dual core CPU, and wish to use head tracking and something like FRAPS at the same time - then I think FreeTrack would have an advantage due to lower CPU load, but that should be determined empirically.

[redsniper]

After all the trouble I put into my freetrack hat, I think I'll keep using it out of spite.

[Mongoose]

I'm really interested in hearing more about some of the stuff people have been managing with the 360's Kinect hardware.  I couldn't care less about the thing as a gaming device, but it has all sorts of fun potential applications as a body-tracking system.

[Nuke]

i still think my trackir camera gives a better fps (120 vs 30) and uses less system resources to run (all the processing is done on the device's mcu). also the lag time in processing can be much bigger using a webcam over trackir. freetrack is more configurable than the trackir software, but i still have the freetrack version that supports trackir cameras. of course if you can get your wiimote to work with it, you get most of the advantages of trackir (less lag time, 100 fps, image processing done at the device, etc), so if you already have a bluetooth dongle and a wiimote you can get the same kinda stuff with $10 bucks and a trip to radio shack.

definitely would like to see what the kinect would do. i think the hacking community produced open source pc drivers for the device before microsoft could roll theirs out. only real problem with camera/sensor based controllers is there are no real standards imposed to make them all interchangeably compatible. there is no library you can include that will cover all the bases, so support for each device would need to be implemented specifically for a certain piece of hardware, which is archaic at best.

[qazwsx]

I AM AIMING WITH MY FACE

[Grizzly]

I AM AIMING WITH MY FACE

I can see this happening now.

"Blink to start".
"Close left eye to fire".

[Thaeris]

WINK OF DEATH!!!

[Nuke]

i tried the whole look to aim your turrets idea with scripting. its more difficult to do than it sounds, but it does provide a sane way to use turrets while flying the ship, its too bad everyone cant be expected to have head tracking hardware, because it would make for some interesting gameplay. at the very least it would require some way to let the user define freelook axes in the event that they dont have any means for head tracking.

[Thaeris]

This is potentially quite a nice bit of software for me, as I've got a built-in webcam in my computer. I still need to try it with FSO, and I've not yet done so due to the fact that I've got some other affairs to attend to. And furthermore, I am a bit concerned with performance as I've only got a 1.6GHz processor. If I can make some time this week, I'll give this a shot and make my report then.