So who has a Freetrack setup?

[Drano]

I broke my finger at work a couple of weeks ago. Not a really exciting story, just some extreme wrench turning that pulled something loose. No biggie. So I'm on the shelf for a couple of more weeks before the doc will release me to come back. So I have some time to kill.

I stumbled across this Freetrack head tracker program ( I know--that's like so 2008! Drano keep up!) that appears to work just like a TrackIR would only you build it yourself and at a fraction of the cost. That's right up my alley! So I thought I'd give it a try. I'm looking to use a Microsoft VX-3000 webcam that I snagged on EBay cheap. Some questions:

1. Remove IR filter from the webcam or not? I was gonna use IR LEDs as it's suggested they work better but I haven't bought any of that stuff yet. Was thinking I just may want to use the webcam as an actual webcam someday and wouldn't want to pretty much destroy it if I didn't have to. But it was cheap.

2.  What did you use for your headset power? I didn't want to use batteries as a power source if I could avoid it. They wear out and then have to be disposed of. I have about a bezillion old DC power supplies laying around so I might as well put them to use. I have one here from an old Fuji camera my daughters broke long ago. It puts out 5vdc @1.5a. I'm thinking that amperage is a little high but I guess the right resistors could knock it down. I also have an old cell phone charger that is rated at 5.9v at only 400ma which might be a better choice. I thought about just using a port on my powered USB hub but thought--what happens if this contraption shorts at some point and it's plugged into my PC? So frig that I'm not goin USB.

Whatever I come up with I'll certainly put a bit more thought as to the stylin aspects of the headgear. Some of the stuff on their forums these guys have built is just plain Frankensteiny! I don't think I'll have any problems with the construction once I get all the parts together. Was wondering if any of you guys were using this setup.

Thanks in advance.

[gyrene81]

check this one out drano...i've tried it and it's very cool...i'm just having trouble getting it tweaked properly...i move my fat head too much. 

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,305477.0.html

all you need is a compatible webcam.

[Drano]

Ahh cool. That'll speed things up. Will give this a shot first and if it works that saves me the minor home electronics project of the clip/cap thingy. The VX-3000 webcam is on the compatible list so that shouldn't be a problem. It oughta be here in a day or so. Will let ya know how it went.

[Tigger29]

I built one a few years back and simply never could get it to work right.  Maybe the camera wasn't good enough, maybe my rig wasn't 'perfectly' proportioned.. who knows?  I did convert it to an IR webcam and used IR LEDs.  I even shaved the LEDs flat but I still never could get it quite right.

If I turned the brightness down it wouldn't pick up the LEDs well enough and if I cranked it up even a little more, the 'globes of light' would interfere with each other.  I did end up getting it to work but not very reliably.  Also the software tended to freeze up a LOT.

Perhaps they've made a lot of improvements in the FreeTrack software since then but I ended up biting the bullet and buying a TrackIR and have never looked back.

I played around a little with the face tracker thing and while it seems to have potential, it has some input lag I don't care for and I had little luck getting it tweaked correctly.  Maybe spending more time with it would yield better results but my TrackIR is too reliable to spend any serious time looking at other options right now.

[Drano]

Was wondering what the FacetracknoIR would do if I was playing in the dark--which I usually am. I'm thinking it can't track what it can't see--right?

[gyrene81]

ya, you need at least ambient light...the faq on the site gives you an example of optimal lighting...i've mounted my camera on the monitor stand just below the screen per the faq recommendation, and with not perfect lighting it tracks very well...i'm looking for a small desk lamp that i can toss a low output cfl into...tough finding a lamp tall enough to provide the right lighting though.

[Drano]

I downloaded both v 1.3 and the last patch. Will give it a try anyway. It may be too much of a drag on my old hoopty machine anyway but it's worth a shot.

[Wraith_TMS]

I used Freetrack before switching to FacetrackNoIR.  Generally speaking, I liked it, though it was a bit unstable at times.  A 7 on a scale of 10.  Rather than spend effort making an LED clip, I simply bought the Naturalpoint Pro Clip from GoGamer for $35.  It was less of a hassle at the time (early 2009).. Freetrack is a very good program and it's still worthy of use.

However, Freetrack's somewhat dated code made it unstable at times, and I just wanted to avoid having all that extra gear and wiring on my headphones, so I moved to FacetrackNoIR.  It is more stable than Freetrack and doesn't need anything extra beyond the web camera.  You don't need to jury rig anything. There are some issues with it being a bit laggy at times (not always).  I've noticed that sometimes when there is a big fight in my area, the tracking gets a little choppy.  At other times, even in a fight, I get 60 FPS or more even while it's on  so It may not be the program.  Not sure, but I would say that is my only complaint with it so far.  It doesn't crash (and it's still in beta, btw), its easy to set up, it's open source, and it is getting ongoing development (which seems to have stalled with Freetrack). I can even move the camera around and it won't crash the program.  I'd give it at least an 8 in it's current state.  A new version is in the works, here's the news about it from their site:

2011-04-30: progress of update 6

For update 6, a number of improvement are on our 'ToDo' list. We are working hard to get things done, but the official release of the update will take some time. Meanwhile, our donators will receive an alpha-version of update 6, to show our appreciation (and to 'serve' as alpha-testers, of course...).

The following improvements have already been implemented:

Upgrade to the newest version of faceAPI, version 3.2.6. It was quite difficult to get this version working with FaceTrackNoIR, because the Qt-implementation of faceAPI was changed. Version 3.2.6. of faceAPI contains a number of improvements, among which:
        Support for newer CPU-types;
        Internal filtering, especially the X and Y rotations are more stable;
        Improved web-cam support;
        For a complete list, please consult the release notes for faceAPI 3.2.6.;
        Fixed a minor bug concerning the 'center' behaviour on startup;
        Moved all protocols to their own separate DLL. This reduces the size of the .EXE, makes the code more 'modular' and makes future expansions easier  to implement.
       Started work on 'Axis Reverse'. It is being tested, but some tweaking is certainly required.
       Also started implementing a 'mouse look' interface. All programs that don't support any of the other protocols, but do have 'mouse look', can benefit from this...

FWIW,

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[gyrene81]

hey drano...try the ini file settings wraith posted at the end of that thread i linked...it's the best place to start out imo.  again wraith for the help with the settings...this next paycheck i should have a much better camera and be able to tweak it to the point where i can jump into the arenas with it.

[The Fugitive]

Check out THIS THREAD. I built one and and posted how it went.

[Drano]

Check out THIS THREAD. I built one and and posted how it went.

Thanks Fugi. Looks like a similar setup like what I was thinkin with the same camera. Only diff is I'm gonna use a plug-in power supply. And I'll try to make it prettier.

Your CPU at the time a single core you say? Mine too. Dated code oughta match my setup perfectly! (check my sig) I notice when running AH that my P4 HT is only occupying the one thread(CPU #0) while the other (CPU#1) is more or less unused. I close out everything else when playing. Wonder if I could set the FT program's affinity to run on (CPU#1) and that might help on the frame rate hit thing? I was worried about that.

[Wraith_TMS]

hey drano...try the ini file settings wraith posted at the end of that thread i linked...it's the best place to start out imo.  again wraith for the help with the settings...this next paycheck i should have a much better camera and be able to tweak it to the point where i can jump into the arenas with it.

Thanks Gyrene!     Glad to help.

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[prono]

Try with one led first. Calibrating 3 leds needs a lot of patience and can make you give up. One led works out of the box  and works great. Go to electronic store buy 1 red led, wire and box for batteries ( 3$ total) Solder stuff together and mount to baseball cap with duct tape. With 5 minutes work you have freetrack ready.
One led gives you only two axis of view but is solid stable, smooth, needs less fps from camera and is not cpu hog.   
 

[Drano]

OK so I got the webcam this afternoon and set it up. No problems there--it was a snap. Thought I'd try to load up FreeTrack and test it with a TV remote control before I went thru the building the LED array thing. The camera sees the IR on the remote pretty brightly without any mods. Cool! But Freetrack won't install initially saying I needed a .dll file which I got from their forums. After installing the .dll the program then went through it's installation fine but after a reboot the program wouldn't start saying it had encountered a problem and would shut down. Tried re-installing. No dice. So I ditched it. No good to me if it won't even run.

Had DL'd FaceTrackNoIR too so I gave that a shot. That installed no problem. Updated it no problem. It starts up fine brings up my cam fine. See my ugly mug on the screen fine. Says I have a FR of 22. Not too bad. I load Wraithe's .ini file and started the engine. It's running balls to the wall on both threads of my CPU for like a few minutes before it finally catches my face. But it kept losing it. Every time it lost my face it went into balls to the wall mode again to find it I guess. That's way, way too much load for my old machine. What would Admiral Akbar say about force of that magnitude? So that's a no go too.

So that was a pretty good idea but it's just not for this machine. It runs the game just fine but won't do any multi-tasking like with this here. Woulda been pretty cool tho. Oh well. Next machine.

[Wraith_TMS]

Had DL'd FaceTrackNoIR too so I gave that a shot. That installed no problem. Updated it no problem. It starts up fine brings up my cam fine. See my ugly mug on the screen fine. Says I have a FR of 22. Not too bad. I load Wraithe's .ini file and started the engine. It's running balls to the wall on both threads of my CPU for like a few minutes before it finally catches my face. But it kept losing it. Every time it lost my face it went into balls to the wall mode again to find it I guess. That's way, way too much load for my old machine. What would Admiral Akbar say about force of that magnitude? So that's a no go too.

So that was a pretty good idea but it's just not for this machine. It runs the game just fine but won't do any multi-tasking like with this here. Woulda been pretty cool tho. Oh well. Next machine.

I don't mean to beat a dead horse, since it's certainly possible that FTNOIR (being a newer program) might be too hard on older machines.  My box runs a dual core too, but it's a bit on the older side (~ 4+ years old).  It runs the program fine, usually.   My point is that it could be your initial set up just needs a bit more tweaking:

One thing I should point out again is the need to install a copy of TIRviews.dll into your FTNOIR installation directory, then making sure it's checked on in the FaceAPI settings dialog.   Just download the TIR software from Naturalpoint (it's free) and install it.  Then copy the TIRviews.dll file from TIR into the FTNOIR main directory.   This is necessary because FTNOIR emulates TrackIR when running in Aces High, so it needs the .dll for emulation purposes.

About facial feature acquisition: every now and then, if you turn off to the side beyond your curve parameters or if you just scratch your nose, the program loses your features and must reacquire.  This can take a few seconds and causes the CPU a bit of churn because it's trying to recalculate..  A few easy things will make this go faster though: 

First, make sure you have the camera in the recommended spot below the monitor and centered.  Second, make sure you have good lighting: a standard desk lamp at 45 dgs off angle to your face will do nicely.  (Better light will increase your camera FPS dramatically).  Third: if the program loses your features, just move your face closer to the camera for a few seconds and it will reacquire faster.  Last thing: make sure you designate the Stop Tracking, and Center Head Position commands in the program keyboard shortcuts, just in case you need to shut it down while in the game.  I use Shift+F9 to stop/start tracking and Shift+f12 to center the head position. 

Good luck.


FWIW,

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