Head trackers determine the position and orientation of the computer user's head, and use this information to modify the view in the artificial 3D world. Usually, this requires a sensor (e.g. a webcam) and special markers mounted on a helmet or cap. This can be colored/reflective points or even (IR)LEDs.
There's a (F/OSS) implementation of a head-tracker that only requires a webcam, without the head gear: EHCI[0] (based on OpenCV[1]). It works with a face detection algorithm. See the following link for a demo. It shows the analyzed face features on the left side, and an overlaid 3D head on the right side. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BovphSjw_tI Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well as the film implies. The guy took care of not turning the head too far and keeping the face rectangle nicely on screen. If one doesn't do that, then the orientation quickly drifts off, and one has to reset the tracker. Anyway, in the hope to see further EHCI improvements in the future, I've written an fgfs addon that uses the tracker information to control the pilot's view. It's a separate application that communicates via UDP socket with fgfs, and there are no changes to fgfs (2.0!) necessary. See the README for further info: $ git clone git://gitorious.org/fg-ehci-headtracker/fg-ehci-headtracker.git Maybe someone is interested in this *and* can perhaps even send me patches for improvements/fixes. :-) Note that the EHCI library is a bit strange (to put it politely), which explains some of the fg-tracker weirdness. Also note, that you have to use it in not too dark environment (or maybe use an IR spot, haven't tried that yet). And I assume you should have a dual core/cpu machine at least. The tracker uses quite some cpu power for image processing, so it shouldn't run on the same cpu/core as fgfs. m. PS: don't expect too much! [0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/ [1] http://code.google.com/p/ehci/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
