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Head games: New flight-control options

Flight Journal, Feb 2003

VIRTUAL PILOT

Since the first flight simulator appeared on the earliest PC monitor, improving a pilot's situational awareness in a simulated cockpit has been an elusive flight sim developers' goal. In recent years, great strides have been taken with the introduction of "virtual cockpits" that attempt to simulate the natural movement of a real pilot who looks around the cockpit and outside his virtual aircraft. But most flight sims still rely heavily on hand controllers and a bewildering array of buttons and keyboard keys to function; this means that virtual pilots may spend more time "flying the interface" than getting an immersive flight experience. Thanks to two new innovative peripherals from NaturalPoint and Maui Innovative Peripherals, the goal of improving "immersion" is one step closer to being a reality.

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Both devices have a great deal in common. They employ head-tracking technology that uses an infrared (IR) signal to determine the location of the player's head in 3D space and adjust the control input accordingly. The idea is that when you tilt your head left or right, your onscreen viewpoint will also change correspondingly. This feature makes using the virtual cockpit option in products such as Flight Simulator 2002 even more immersive, as simply moving your head from side to side will result in a corresponding viewpoint movement on the screen.

The NaturalPoint TrackIR GX works its magic by employing an IR device that resembles a standard Web cam that sits atop your computer monitor. Once the software and TrackIR hardware, which is attached to an open USB port with the included cable, has been installed and configured successfully, you must place a small IR dot on your forehead. The IR device can determine the direction in which you are looking by bouncing an infrared signal off the dot and converting that information into control inputs.

It takes a while to get used to using your head as a control device, but once you've mastered the basics, it works rather well. I tested the TrackIR with the virtual-cockpit features in Flight Simulator 2002 and IL-2 Sturmovik, and the results were impressive. Both became much more immersive when you use the TrackIR, which makes the virtual-cockpit features that much more useful.

Maui Innovative's Cymouse uses roughly similar technology, but the "build" quality and perceived value of the Cymouse was much greater than that of the TrackIR system. Cymouse's one potential drawback is that it employs a fairly large, head-mounted sensor that resembles large headphones turned sideways. A note to the fashion-conscious: the Cymouse headset elicited slack-jawed stares of befuddlement from my wife and children when they saw me wearing it, but once I had demonstrated how well it worked, their reaction changed dramatically.

The Cymouse ships with a large

number of predefined profiles that help it run more effectively with many popular PC games, although it doesn't ship with any predefined profiles for flight sims. That said, setting up a custom Cymouse profile for Flight Simulator 2002 wasn't difficult; after about 30 minutes of configuration and testing, I was up and running without any problems. I also tested the Cymouse with a variety of other PC games, and the system worked well in nearly all cases, but some games required a bit more configuration and fine-tuning.

Both products worked as advertised, although I'm somewhat partial to the Cymouse owing to its sturdier construction, better native support for other PC games and, at press time, its better value at a low introductory price of $99 versus $129 for the TrackIR. The TrackIR has better native support for Flight Simulators (especially Flight Simulator 2002) and has established a strong community of active flight-sim aficionados who use the TrackIR as part of their control setups. Either product opens up a new realm of flight control if you're willing to spend the time to configure and fine-tune them to work properly.

Head games: New flight-control options

Flight Journal, Feb 2003

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