General / Off-Topic I urge everyone to sign this petition, with the aim of ending Frontier's dangerous relationship with NaturalPoint, or TrackIR.

Ozram

Ozram
How interesting. I was always wondering why the price was so high when the equipment itself is so simple. OP, perhaps you could have worded your thread more as a PSA and allowed others to come to their own conclusions. That may be more effective. Still, not click bait. Those clearly inflated prices are what's kept me from getting track ir in the first place. Now I feel somewhat vindicated in doing so.
 

tawittle

tawittle
Yes I completely ripped myself off when I bought trackIR. I was so excited to spend tens of hours buying parts, building and programming a head tracker and it was such a bummer when I ordered one off of amazon and got it 2 days later.

Lots of companies manipulate their prices. Should we stop buying 2$ soda because the soda itself costs practically nothing and the container to hold it costs 5-10 cents?
 
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Ozram

Ozram
sbdags said:
Using TrackIR and Tobii Eye and don't understand the issues...
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I think the issue isn't with the quality of the product, but rather the aggressive monopoly which keeps the prices artificially inflated. Whether you agree with this or not is entirely up to you.
 

Loskene

L
Having read the entire thing, yeah that's actually a lot of shady monopolistic practices for one company to partake in. It would probably do us all well to see them taken down a peg, but the way you worded this post kind of makes getting that message across an uphill battle from the start.
You can't assume that everyone will just read the whole thing before commenting or care about what it says unless you give them a good reason.
 

xondk

X
There are a bunch of free alternatives to using TrackIR, vote with your wallet where it actually counts rather then attacking frontier, they just support the technology, that's it.
 

Thetele

T
You know that you don't need TrackIR to have head tracking in elite or in other games? You can build your own easily or use web cam.
 

Loskene

L
xondk said:
There are a bunch of free alternatives to using TrackIR, vote with your wallet where it actually counts rather then attacking frontier, they just support the technology, that's it.
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To sum up the main problems: The company making TrackIR is trying to make it so you can't vote with your wallet, by monopolizing the headtracking market with patent trolling and restrictive NDAs for any company that wants to support the technology. They've been successful and have avoided scrutiny over the matter for a long time now, to the point where they can artificially inflate their prices to an extreme degree. A statement of disapproval from a company like Frontier could help shed light on the practice and force them to stop if enough companies joined in. But they might not be able to under the terms of a legally binding non-disclosure agreement, hence this little publicity stunt.
 

Darmach

D
Damn right! Monopolies are dangerous, and should be fought with for simple reason - there might came some point when you will not have the freedom of choice between products because of them. As with Track IR, thats a great product. Not worth the money but otherwise great. But acting legally to ban using other solutions, making game creators sign legal agreements forbiding implementing other protocols...
 

xondk

X
Loskene said:
To sum up the main problems: The company making TrackIR is trying to make it so you can't vote with your wallet, by monopolizing the headtracking market with patent trolling and restrictive NDAs for any company that wants to support the technology. They've been successful and have avoided scrutiny over the matter for a long time now, to the point where they can artificially inflate their prices to an extreme degree. A statement of disapproval from a company like Frontier could help shed light on the practice and force them to stop if enough companies joined in. But they might not be able to under the terms of a legally binding non-disclosure agreement, hence this little publicity stunt.
Click to expand...
Elite and many other headtracking supporting games I know have support for a wide range of headtracking, so I really don't see how they are successful? especially given the free alternatives?
 
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