ED Blue Peter Head Tracker

Hi,

Been meaning to share this for a while. ED now supports TrackIR. FaceTrackNoIR software can head-track with games supporting TrackIR out of the box btw FaceTrackNoIR software is free.

You need PS Eye Camera about £12. You also need the free PS Eye Camera free Windows driver http://codelaboratories.com/products/eye/driver/

For best results you need TrackClip PRO http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/02-products/product-TrackClip-PRO.html about £30-35. Btw the wavelength of the IR light produced by the LEDs on the TrackClip PRO is 850nm.


You then need some perspex that blocks visible light and allows through infra-red light. You put the perspex at the front of the web-cam lens to stop visible light entering and only for the infra-red led lights from the TrackClip PRO to be picked up. Perspex (perspex, colours - black 962 (infrared transmitting)) can be bought from http://www.theplasticshop.co.uk/samples-3-pack-3600-0.html for £6. You only need the sample pack as we are just covering the lens mounting circle black plastic thing. You can then bond the perspex with Pritt Stick. This will allow you to take it off when you want to use the PS Eye Camera as web/Skype camera.

Yes other people use 2 sheets of exposed developed film etc but that perspex has specifically been manufactured to get rid of non infrared light and allow IR light in. I don't have a spectral graph but others have compared how bright the LEDs are through different material and this perspex is one of the best materials. There are plenty of threads out there on Google. There are other band pass filters but they are made of glass and cost about £30. As you have guessed it's not my work but have brought multiple sources together.

Of course you can just use the FaceTrackNoIR with the facial recogition to track your face but it uses pretty much 1 core on 3.6GHz quad core Intel i5. Also with facial tracking you need decent lights levels in the room especially on your face to allow tracking. Dim light facial tracking is not great.


Why not just buy TrackIR; for one it's over priced for what it provides (£135:eek:) and isn't that great in terms of quality. Heat production of the main unit that sits on your monitor (people actually build heats-sinks for the processing chip on the TrackIR), even the TrackClip PRO is flimsy, Google it and you will find the reasons, too numerous to list.

Happy New Year
Haider
 
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A more authentic Blue Peter experience might be had with "Delanclip" (offered by its creator via ebay) i.s.o. a TrackClip Pro. The Delanclip is not only kind of home made, but it's cheaper and seems a lot more robust than the official product.

(Not that I have either as yet).
 
I've setup facetracknoir with the recogintion option and it works very well.
It drains about 6% of my cpu, but my rig is a little overpowered with 6 cores running at 3.4 Ghz.
 
Is FaceTrackNoIR working with ED? If so I'd appreciate some instructions on how to get ED to recognise it, as I haven't had any joy so far.
 
Ditto to the requests about FacetracknoIR setup.

Got the software installed - it can see my head movements but not sure what if anything needs to be done to get the game to see it or vice versa.
 
Not tried it myself yet (no webcam atm), but the installer puts a virtual joystick driver on the system. Surely attaching that to the "view" keybindings that default to the second hat on your stick (I think if you have 2 hat stick) or mouse is all you need do.

Need to get a webcam... :D
 
The program it installed "vjoy"?? interfered with my menu system, so i uninstalled it.

Facetracknoir works in other games through Track IR and auto configures itself. I think ED will need this added for it to work.
 
Just bought Delan clip and ps3 eye. Should be a bit of fun.
But I too would like a bit more on how it fares with ED. Am still waiting for the second beta to start...
 
That would be great! Thanks for trying.
It is early days though, I have faith, lol.
:)

HaiderGill seems to know what he is on about, the opening post seems to suggest that FaceTrackNoIR is interchangeable/ compatible with Track IR.
Has anyone with alpha 1.1 tried Private Messaging him?
 
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I'll be going this route too, so hopefully it'll either work, or FD will be able to get it working for later in development.
 
Bet it doesn't work anywhere near as well as the official product does.

I have a feeling that facetracknoir + decent camera + delanclip will give TrackIR a run for its money -- delanclip in particular (being machined from a piece of aluminium) looks much better to me than the plastic TrackIR product, which is quite flimsy according to reviews I've seen.

I believe you can use delanclip with TrackIR gear, though. Can't wait to get started playing with this stuff for real, in-game.
 
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