James Burgess

A week or so ago, I was sent a TrackIR 4 Pro, by NaturalPoint, to review for RaceSimCentral.  Over the next week or two I’m going to be ‘living with’ the device, and seeing how it affects my gaming and sim-racing pleasures - but I thought I’d give you a sneak peek into how I’ve been getting on.

My first impression was of how tiny the TrackIR device itself is - only a few centimetres wide and tall.  I’m not sure why I was expecting something bigger, but I was.

After setting the TrackIR up, the installation process was largely painless (a simple case of dropping in the installation CD, running the installer and plugging in the device).  The TrackIR itself comes with a reflector clip which is intended to be clipped onto your average baseball cap and worn whilst using the device - it provides the light sources for the infrared camera to detect movement.  Of course, this doesn’t perform so well when direct light is visible to the camera - so that’s something to beware of.

After fiddling with the various options for the amplification of head movements, I managed to get in-game (with the ArmA: Armed Assault tactical shooter) and had my first look around… what a fantastic piece of kit.  Somewhat difficult to get used to, granted, but the impact on shooters (and, also, on sim-racing… but that’s the topic for the forthcoming review) was absolutely astonishing.

The device provides the full six degrees of freedom (6DOF): Yaw, Roll, Pitch and movements along the X/Y/Z axes.  You probably won’t use all 6DOF in any one game, but usually 4 or 5 come in handy at once.  In ArmA, X-axis movement was bound to leaning, whilst Yaw, Roll and Pitch were bound to simple head movements.

From what I’ve had a chance to experience so far, TrackIR is an essential piece of kit for anyone who really enjoys the immersion factor in shooters, racing sims and flight sims (I’m struggling to think of many other genres that would benefit dramatically).

I’ll keep you updated, and post the full review when I’ve posted it on RSC.