Will there be a Tobii EyeTracker 4C option in BMS?

[cashman]

Hi last night saw Tobii Eyetracker 4C on the net. I do not have any hands on experience with the thing but since it seem to work very well with Arma3, FSX and XPlane, I thought it would definitely work well with BMS… If implemented of course…

So are there anyone who have hands on experience with Tobii? And also might there be plans to implement it into BMS in 2-3 “Falcon” weeks?

Regards,

[uri_ba]

only problem is it seems to be “relative” and not “absolute”
i.e. TIR gives you (with some getting used to) ability to get spacial awareness. you know where you look at.

this thing pans when you move your view, like the HAT switch does.

[sthalik]

TL;DR it’s gonna be in opentrack as the next feature, but take my time and energy constraints into account.

TL;DR you can’t compare it to head tracking. Apples and oranges. You can compare applicability in flight simulation software of that kind of input method.
TL;DR it’s more than a hat switch. Accumulative mode is more of a very accurate analog hat switch, built into your eyes.

We’ll have both modes in opentrack – accumulative and glance. It’s the last critical-priority item after Vive, and Vive is practically done for the next binary release. I’m very thankful to the person who made the plugin fully work. I don’t own any HMDs so it wasn’t really feasible.

But the accumulative mode is hard to shape to make it usable. I’ve already spent a decent amount of time with it, and the gain code has some typos when taking derivatives. Given that we’re done with Vive, I can put other requested items into a backlog and fix the code the next time I sit on opentrack in a longer session. It should take 2-3 straight days of longer programming sessions. But this is hard for me to perform.

Don’t expect wonders from the accumulative mode though. It’s not comparable to a head tracking device. We could cap it to, say, 45-60 degrees yaw but that’s very little. We’ve already tried and achieved stable -180->180 tracking, but the nature of the accumulative mode made it hard not to lose one’s bearing. The glance mode is a pushover.

Again, the device doesn’t compare to LED, marker tracking et al. It gives peripheral vision but it’s a different use-case, not a substitute.

I continue to build the plugin to prevent it from breaking over time, but given that it’s incomplete, it’s not present in opentrack binary releases.

It’s actually pretty easy to look at once place and avoid hysteresis-like oscillation, but ideally you’d get 60-90 degrees yaw and a quick snap to 180.

I have the formulae mapped out for a configurable sigmoid mapping, except for the typos. You’ll get several sliders to shape the response and see the resulting sigmoid shape in real time.

Right now the only plugin that’s owned by someone else is RealSense, for which I’m very thankful to the maintainer. But you see how shorthanded opentrack development is.

Edit: Being stationary in the pit is harder to lose one’s bearing compared to Arma’s infantry. We’ll see how many degrees I can squeeze out of it. But don’t count on continuous 120 or 180.
Edit: We could apply glancing as an offset from head tracker output.

[michaell089]

The toby eye 4c also has head tracking xyz axis so it’s pretty much the same as trackir but better in my opinion!

What do you think the timeframe will be before you guys can implement tobii eye? and is it useable without native support in the game?

Cheers,

Michael

[cashman]

Thanks for the comments guys… And good luck on the development sthalik, I hope you’ll find the time…

As michaell089 mentioned, Tobii 4C has also said to have head tracking functionality. ( like Track IR as far as I can understand) That was the reason for my question. Since I do not own Tobii 4C, I can not make comments on the performance of head tracking option(please feel free to comment if someone has) but since it has been integrated into FSX which also have a 3D cockpit (also for Take on Helicopters which can not be rated as a study sim but nevertheless has a 3D cockpit ), I believe there may be some potential in that area for BMS…

@michalel089, I’m not sure (since I do not own it as I mentioned) but 4C most possibly will not work without native support. But there are SDKs on their website if anyone is interested.

https://tobiigaming.com/developer/

Best regards,