TrackIR 5

I've used TrackIR since it's introduction, currently I'm using version 3 with 3D upgrade.

I was just browsing through PC Pilot and noticed a full page ad for TrackIR 5. I tried a quick internet search but came up empty handed.

What, if anything do you think version 5 can deliver that earlier versions, particularly TrackIR 4 pro, can't ?

Confirmed but with no details at Natural Point's TrackIR forum;

http://forum.naturalpoint.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=35797#Post35797

Good question

I just got a TIR 4 a couple months ago. I have had a TIR 1 since very soon after they came out.

One thing that would be nice.
A hotkey to enable the mouse cursor to move with the view and then be able to activate a switch on the panel with a mpped button on a joystick.

In other words, to be able to hit the 'bind mouse to TIR' hot key and the cursor appears in the center of the screen. You look down at a switch on the panel and center the cursor over the switch using TIR, not the actual mouse. Then hit another joystick button to activate the switch. No need to touch the mouse at all.

I can't really think of anything that would improve the current one much more than it is now, other than some really cool and useful feature such as this.

I have no idea if anything like this would ever be possible, but I have a feeling it could be done. It would be very nice feature too.
Maybe I should post this at Naturalpoint.

Now if it had an "eye" that could track head movement without the need for lights or reflective surfaces that would be worth the upgrade. Off the top of my head I don't know what else they could really add to the existing trackir that would be a major step forward.

Only real improvement would be 3D goggles, which support a refreshrate so high, that you get no eyestrain. Only that and maybe a VR helmet would be a step forward.

You can see that SimHQ has started running a banner for these - the NP 6DOF logo with a "5" by it.

There could be something related on http://www.dslyecxi.com/ , but it all just could be a happy coincidence as well.

Looked at the picture, maybe I'm just exercising some typical British restraint, but it looks pretty much like a TrackIR 4 pro setup to me, it will be interesting to see what they have on offer to encourage me to upgrade in time for RoF and ArmA II.

Ok, I've started a thread, because it's peeked my interest (maybe that's the idea and I have no problem trying to promote Natural Point) and I've been a long time fan of TrackIR and the development team, but what is the point of putting up adverts and click banners if they lead to nothing relevant.

To build interest, I suppose. We're talking about it, aren't we? I for one am interested to see Dslyecxi's website tomorrow. But I agree - if I saw that picture with no context, I would just think it was another picture of someone's setup that included a TrackIR 4. Unless your iPhone has been integrated into the TrackIR system...

There's another something up now. Full thing is still tomorrow, but this gives an idea of what the 'full thing' is.

Nice vid. Can't wait until later to see what all the fuss is about.

Ok its tomorrow now wtf is up

Ok, some possible new info that seems quite accurate, from the Natural point forums.

:)) some facts:

3 times the resolution of TrackIR 4
Larger field of view
New image processing design for more accurate, smoother tracking
Improved sunlight filtering
Detachable base to improve durability
Completely new software with more options, and a much more user friendly interface (software will work with TrackIR 3 with Vector, TrackIR 4, and TrackIR 5)


The question I have is (I am using TrackIR 3 pro) what difference will a greater resolution have. Natural point have claimed it will in fact be up to 10 x the resolution of the 4 pro.

Does more resolution matter? I find that my tracking stability right now is limited by how precisely I can keep my head where I want it (while dogfighting, landing, etc.), not by a hardware limitation of the TrackIR.

It's so nearly not the 30th here anymore, what a tease.

Still the 30th where I am.

I'll be interested to see the full details of this. No mention of facial recognition though Drat!

What time zone would that be?

CST/CDT. 10:31pm at the moment. It's on the way, just not out right this second. Much closer than an hour ago, though!

lol@Dslyecxi

Aaaaaalmost there. "Almost there" teaser follows.

dammit... don't post anymore till you have it, lol... i see your name in the reply so i check, and nothing.

I rarely visit this forum but waiting now.

It's up! Full info is on the BIS forums here:
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=72436

Thanks Dslyecxi, great vid and review. I might just have to open up my Scottish piggy bank (do Muslims have piggy banks ?) and get myself one of those new fangled toys.

Maybe its just me, but I don't see much benefit in getting TIR 5. I have been using TIR 4 for a few years now and I have not found any hardware limitations that effect my gameplay in a negative way.

Someone enlighten me on why TIR 5 is worth getting over a TIR 4?

High resolution/more accurate tracking is the main thing for me. I use a fairly responsive profile, so being able to look, say, 90 degrees left while still having a very stable POV (noticeably moreso than TIR4, while using a more 'aggressive' profile than I did in TIR4), means a lot to me. I can use less smoothing and higher sensitivity and get much nicer responsiveness and stability than I did through TIR4.

Might have to look into picking this up this summer.

I have a TIR3 and may pass that on to the 11 year old for his future simming.

Anybody download the TIR 5 software? I just got an e-mail from Natural Point with a download link but I'm at work.

I ordered my trackir 1 a week before they released trackir 2, and here I am sitting in my office waiting for the UPS driver to deliver my trackir 4. Talk about bad timing.

I share your luck. Bought a trackir 1 way back and just a few weeks later, trackir2 came out. And of course, I just bought a trackir 4 about 6 weeks ago!

after seeing the 'demo' of it in ArmA 2, I'm REALLY thinking about getting one (never owned one before); but I just can't swing $160 right now...

maybe someday lol

Hey guys,

The TrackIR 4 was the standard model for over 3 years. It was only the early models that came rapidly after one another. Those days are long gone. The TrackIR 5 is another leap forward with the tech. The software interface has been completely re-designed and they made it backwards compatible with the older models. Plus the everyday price is lower than the previous launches. Overall it's a good step forward for NP I think.

For those that are interested, GoGamer has Free shipping on the TrackIR 5 and we are currently offering a Free copy of rFactor and BOB II along with it.

Here's the link.

http://www.gogamer.com/TrackIR-5-View-by...0VVviewprod.htm

:-)

Jason

It's $149.90 out the door at GoGamer and you get two free games.

Jason

Just watched the video. Very impressive land combat applications of the TrackIR. It's very nice to know that the independent head motion / body motion concept is finding its way into tactical shooters.

That software looks amazing as well.

ARMA II looks extremely impressive. Same goes for the Trackir 5.

Wonder how many who own a Trackir 4 are going to upgrade to a 5? At 150 its a reasonably priced piece of tech. For me, I haven't owned my Trackir 4 for such a long period of time as to warrent an upgrade especially considering that the 5 is more evolutionary than a radical new design. It is very tempting though.

I plan on upgrading, once I have the cash set aside to buy it.

I meant the bundle that has the tracker that clips to a headset

Im not upgrading.

I'll be upgrading, I've got an older TrackIR 3.

There must be a lot of people out there in a similar situation, do I/don't I, more so if they have an older TrackIR unit like myself. I'm surprised Naturalpoint don't make more of this in their marketing and offer rebates to existing users, after all their biggest potential customer base and greatest fans I assume all ready have a unit, it's just a question of convincing them it's worthwhile upgrading.

It blows for me, I just bought my TrackIR 4 a month ago for IL2. Wish I knew this was coming out, I would of waited.

Hi again guys

Since I just got the 4 about 3 months ago, I doubt I will get a 5.
I am going to try the software though. Seems to be a major upgrade there.

You sold me on ArmA 2 though. I'm going to get it for sure
I tried TIR in Morrowind years ago. It actually worked ok, but not anything like what is now possible. Seeing that vid, I see everything working the way TIR should for view control in shooters. I'm sold on that now and looking forward to getting this one and using TIR in it.

Now watch, it will ruin me for all other shooters that still require the mouse for view control, haha.
Seriously though, it might. I can't play a race or flight sim that doesn't support it. Watching that vid, I can see how using it in a shooter could cause me to not want to play them without it too.

I really like the look of the new software, but so far there's functionally no difference that I've been able to find.

Clicky to chart comparing v4 and v5



What is the best way for UK simmers to purchase track ir v5 ?

RC Simulations, near Bristol, is NaturalPoint's UK distributor for Track IR. their website shows that they are waiting for stock.

they list Track IR 5 for 124.95 GBP and 139.95 GBP for a bundle including the track clip pro.

http://www.rcsimulations.com/

sky-sim.co.uk is listed on the Naturalpoint website as being a dealer of track ir. they don't have the track ir 5 listed, but they probably get their stock from rc simulations.

http://www.sky-sim.co.uk/catalog/index.php

From viewing the video, it looks like it is much easier to see how your settings influence the range and extremes of motion of your virtual head, without starting a game.

I've taken a look at the profile xmls for both the v4 and v5 software, and the format is different, but the content seems to be about the same. BTW, You can run your old profiles in the new software.

The pano feature is nice, but I wish there was an easy way to make your own. The BOB II shot is fine, but I'd just like to be able to see how other types of sims look.

Give it time. I am sure we will get some review units and then we can try them in a bunch of games. I am interested in seeing how it looks in BS, FSX and Aces High myself.

Would be possible to explain the harware used to get those amazing graphics.

I mean was a mid range system with a q6600 running at a reasonable overclocked, with a 9800gtx, or a 4870, or was it a i7 extream machine running with a gtx295?

Im in the possible of building a system and this game is a large factor.

The lighting affects and wow factor and behond any thing Ive seen yet.


Can the Author of the vid list what he thinks is a good system for this game? Or if others could give some input.

Still amazing at this vid some days later, totally blown away.


bud

bud,

I have a quad core & 2.66GHz, not an i7, but the older type. Video card is a Geforce 285. I have 4GB of DDR3 RAM and run on WinXP.

Glad you liked the vid.

We will look at including more views (panos), as we get them (create them)............

The A2A guys provided me with the basic images, so that is what I used for the first release of the software. As time permits I will look at grbabing more images, and converting them for inclusion in the software......

I have an old TrackIR 3 with with the vector expansion, and decided to upgrade (from GoGamer through the banner ads at SimHQ, of course).

I just hooked it up yesterday, and while I haven't had a chance to use it much yet, I like it. It's not significantly different in how it works with what I've played on it, but it has a wider field of view and I don't move beyond it's range like I did on version 3. I can also put it on my monitor, where I had to put the version 3 on boxes stacked behind my monitor to get it far enough away to increase the field of view.

I didn't download the version 5 software because it was listed as still being in beta, but the 5 unit worked fine with the latest non-beta software.

I am almost positive that without the 5 software, you will not get the full benefit of the TIR5 (due to software enhancements re: tracking). Just because it's in "beta" should not stop you from downloading it - it's meant to work with the TIR5.

I saw this yesterday and i was totally impressed with the ammount of bs natural point is pushing. "sub-pixel resolution" and "reporting resolution". The problem is, subpixel actually means something, but what it means is not what it means in NP's dictionary, and that is nothing but bs.

This is not new with Natural Point, as they used this marketing bs before with their old "resolution doubling technology" with TrackIR 4, but this is taking it to new levels. I know is customary for cheap camera producers to list some <extrapolated resolution> in their crap products' specs, but they were decent compared to Natural Point. I mean, they did doubled or quadrupled the senzor hw resolution when reporting the <extrapolated res>, but that is nothing compared to this 6.7 MILLION megapixels Natural Point is reporting for TrackIR 5. Not just ridiculous, but insulting; i mean, you sell this to simmers (and not for a couple of bucks, mind you), which generally are a lot more technical savy then your average joe, the same guys who kept your business going for some years now, and go about trying bs them.

Not cool.

Im not sure what definition of sub-pixel you are refering to, or think we are refering to, but here is a basic understanding of what it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-pixel_resolution

rofl, wikipedia, the ultimate technical reference.

If you're seriously implying that TIR5's sensor has 150 subpixels per pixel... again

Let me point you to the source: http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/02-products/trackir-product-comparison.html

Raw Sensor Resolution 640 x 480
Sub-pixel Resolution 1/150th pixel
Reporting Resolution 96,000 x 72,000
Horizontal Field of View 51.7°
Resolution/Horizontal Field of View Degree 1850 subpixels/degree

So let's check out the arithmetics here, shall we?

640 (pixels horizontal) * 150 (subpixels lol) = 96000
480 (vertical) * 150 = 72000
That gives us the "reporting resolution" of 96000 * 72000 = 6912000000 pixels = 6.912 million MP = 6.912 gigapixels
51.7 (degrees horizontal) * 1850 (subpixel / degree) = 95645 (these are the 96000 horizontal subpixels lol, of course this 1850 subpixel/degree number was not really needed since anyone can do the math, but can't hurt to bring in the many zeroes, right? bs marketing @ it's finest)

Let me quote from this popular Natural Point reference, wikipedia:



Basically NP is implying that the TIR5 device is somehow capable of this astronomical 7 million MP "reporting" resolution, which is outrageous. Obviously a USB2 (or even USB3 for that matter) device is far from capable of sustaining such an enormous transfer of data, even if TIR5 streams monochrome (it probably does, and it should).

Obviously, the TIR5 couldn't possibly have this kind of resolutions, nevermind "reporting" it lol. Not unless they brought the device from the future, and when you plug it into your pc it magically converts your USB2.0 ports into USB10.0 .

So what is this mythical 7GP "reporting resolution"? Well, marketing bs. Yes, we might hear from NP_Vincent again (sorry mate, nothing personal) and he might tell us how this number was carrefully calculated and it actually represents some kind of interpolation made by the software. But what it really is is marketing bs.

Let me tell you how this went down:
Marketing NP dude comes to technical NP dude:
- so, how's the TIR5 coming along? we really need to show our potential customers that they need to buy it, how it's much better than the TIR4 so they must upgrade.
- well, it's got a slightly wider angle of view, and this time we use a full VGA res senzor, plus we got a better construction concept.
- great! but i think we should make it, you know, sound more impressive! how about, you know, i saw this thing they got going with "extrapolated resolution", i thought that was very smart, you know, really great marketing.
- but that's not right, that's just software extrapolation, doesn't really say anything about the product's specs and...
- fantastic! i'm glad you agree! now let see, we want to be creative, right, so we're not going to call it "extrapolated", how about "reported", yeah, great, and since it's an extrapolation (ha! ha!) of this brilliant marketing concept i say we should go strong on this and multiply our hardware resolution not by two, but by one thousand! no, wait, why go small, we multiply it by 300000 times! Yeah! you go now and make up some technical terms, yes, that's a good boy.

Axe to grind, eh?

I have no idea how the TrackIR works, but when reading about transferring all that data across USB, it made me wonder if that is even necessary.

The sensor could have a very fine resolution to detect small amounts of movement, but it may only have to transmit some coordinates or something to the PC to represent the motion amount and direction. It wouldn't be sending much data at all if it worked like that. Kind of like a mouse - I don't believe that they send an entire screen resolution's worth of data when you move them, just speed and direction.

Dslyecxi, That's an amazing vid with a quad 2.66. Goes to show you also how important the video card is--even with a medium quad cpu you are getting great use out of that 285!

Incredible. Points to the fact that it's good to get the best video card you can afford even if your cpu is mid grade.

Thanks for the info!

Glad you liked it. I didn't realize it was a mid-grade CPU at this point. Shows how much I keep track of CPU details these days.

Regarding the whole "reporting resolution" etc stuff - I'm not big on tech specs (surprise!) myself, I'm much more interested in the results. The results I get are described in the video, of course. I like it, it's an improvement to me - can't really say much more than that (ok, I can say more than that, but I already did, in video form..). Several people in my group have already picked theirs up, and they're reporting similar. That's the best I can give you. I'm not techy enough to critique or even really comment on the cited specs of the TIR5, but I am comfortable with saying that it's better than a TIR4, based on a good deal of personal experience. That's all I can really offer you.

TrackIR 5 does have the raw and reporting resolution we claim—otherwise we would not claim it. We respect our customers and are not misleading them with our marketing. Our measurements are based on engineering and physical testing.

Reporting resolution is not the same as raw sensor resolution, so we’re not implying that TrackIR 5 is a gigapixel camera. Neither are our numbers the result of software interpolation. In fact, TrackIR is not even a “camera” in the way you are describing, and its function is different than standard camera imaging. We’re not out to capture what an image looks like. We’re looking for the location of marker centroids.

When we describe sub-pixel resolution, we are defining how accurately we can discern the center of the marker in terms of pixels. It is a unit of measurement. Although our raw sensor size is 640 x 480, TrackIR 5 can actually measure movement that is much smaller than a pixel—as small as 1/150th of a pixel. Spread that across 640 pixels and what do you get? A range of 96,000 detectable object locations.

That’s not the same as saying that we have a 6 gigapixel camera. If you have a ruler with 12 inches on it, and you measure an object that falls in between the inch marks, accurate measurement requires sub-inch units. The principle is the same with our grayscale image processing. The center of a marker usually lies between two adjacent pixel locations. We use sub-pixel analysis to accurately find that center down to 1/150th of a pixel's accuracy. Clearly we do not transmit the entire image. The entire benefit of having a TrackIR is that we make a custom, purpose-built product for tracking markers. It processes the image on-board at 120 FPS, which is a very large amount of data, and then only transmits the relevant information to the PC. Thus, there is very little load on the PC.

Consumer digital cameras used for photography sometimes use sub-pixel resolution when creating a viewable image, in which case adjacent pixels may be interpolated. That is not what we are doing—we have a grayscale imager, and we don’t use a Bayer pattern. Rather, we are describing how our new processing has advanced the effective resolution of finding a marker and reporting its center to the software. There are many ways to do this, and our method has achieved the resolution we report.

If you don't believe our figures, please feel free to test them yourself with our free OptiTrack SDK and a micrometer.

Hi all

After looking around for a good price on the trackir5 Pro in th UK I managed to get a good price on eBay of all places £105 + £16.00 p+p, from the US, there are more from the seller, here.

Ebay

This is my first dive into trackIR territory what with Arma2, rise of flight and maybe even SOW making an appearance this millennium it looks like it's a must have, plus it givwes me a chance to dust off some of the older games.

Well, maybe a 2.66 quad (not I7) is not exactly mid grade..., or is it?



Probably depends on who/what you are used to or comparing to.

Nice explanation--NP Seth.

The better way to explain this is that the sensor is taking the average of a collection of pixels, and that allows for the interpolation of sub-pixel locations. TrackIR4 averaged 20 pixel locations, and TrackIR5 averages 150.

So TrackIR4 was 355 x 20 x 288 x 20 = 7,100 x 5,760 and TrackIR5 is 640 x 150 x 480 x 150 = 96,000 x 72,000 discreet locations that could be calculated.

The problem is that if the sensor is not seeing the full 150 active pixels then the quality of the average falls off. Theoreticaly the absolute minimum number of active pixels to get 6 degrees of freedom is just 3. I would imagine the software has a much higher minimum cut-off than that, but you would only get 640 x 3 x 480 x 3 = 1920 x 1440

Here's a simple example. Let's say we have a 10 x 10 grid of sensors, and we want to know the center of three points within the grid.
Point 1 = 2 , 6
Point 2 = 1 , 9
Point 3 = 7 , 2
Average = 10/3 , 17/3 = 3 1/3 , 5 2/3

so our integer x , y locations have each been divided into fractional thirds. Rather than just 100 physical locations we can now calculate 900 average locations of 3 signals.

Actually, that isn't quite how it works. We aren't averaging 20 pixel locations to get 1/20th pixel accuracy. Instead, we use sophisticated weighting of all the pixels related to a detected marker. While there is a relation between the number of pixels in a marker and the accuracy with which the marker's position can be calculated, it isn't a 1:1 correlation. Nor is the correlation linear.