SmoothTrack: Head Tracker

John Goering

About this app

SUPPORTS ANY DEVICE WHICH CAN INSTALL GOOGLE AR SERVICES.

SmoothTrack provides 3D head tracking for intuitively controlling your sim game's camera, using the AR capabilities of your device. Any game that supports TrackIR works with SmoothTrack!

----
"The best new controller on the market...if you're flying a plane on PC, you need to check it out." - Polygon
----

It's a near magical experience to seamlessly slightly move your head and have your game perspective immediately play along (the movements in the game are magnified so that you only have to make slight movements of your head to control the camera).

- Simply lean forward to get a closer look at your Flight Simulator cockpit!
- Look a bit up to see the overhead panel of your A320!
- Simply shift your head a bit to the right to see the direction of the space station you're approaching in Elite: Dangerous!
- Look a bit left before a hard left turn in Euro Truck Simulator 2!

No headset or extra equipment of any kind is required! Simply set up your device so that it can see your face. Using simple camera gestures, you can shift your perspective in-game.

Your head movements are slightly exaggerated which enables you to look out of a cockpit side window with just a slight movement of your head to the left.

Includes a dark mode to save your battery and your OLED screen, as well as a bright mode for playing in a dark room!

Any game that supports the FreeTrack or TrackIR protocol will work with this, including:

- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Microsoft FSX
- Elite: Dangerous
- IL2: Sturmovik
- Euro Truck Simulator 2
- Kerbal Space Program
- ...and many, many others!

Discord and Email support is provided if there are any issues (or if you have any ideas for new features!).

Ratings and reviews

I get a very small lag delay when moving my head around and the camera moving. There is a float sensation that makes me overshoot what I want to look at. Even playing around with the sliders, OpenTrack curves, sensitivity, deadzones, smoothing I just can't get it to feel right. The USB mode, which the setup feels super sketchy to run by the way, didn't make much of a difference. It works, I guess, but OpenTrack is free and had the same feeling I got with SmoothTrack so no gain for me.

App is not nearly as accurate on Android (Samsung Galaxy S20) as it is on iPhone (15 Pro). It would not register with me looking to the right (mirroring turned on) as well as it does to the left of the screen. It also would get stuck, stuttering in one spot and would have to close and restart the app. Unusable. However it works flawlessly on iPhone. Only using it on my Android because my iPhone is where I get notifications so I wanted to use the backup as a stationary head tracker.

Using with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Fairly easy setup. It uses Open track, found that mapping "center" to button in OpenTrack was helpful to auto align your head position. Also mapping button in OpenTrack to toggle tracking on/off also was key. Small issue where app may stop working, seems like if you go to text or another app, but close and reopen app and works again. Hopefully will come out with option to use webcam for more flexibility.

What’s new

Here's what's new in this HUGE update of SmoothTrack:

* Brand new and improved UI, rewritten from the ground up to be 93% less ugly!
* new 120 fps mode, using interpolation to send data to OpenTrack twice as often!
* new camera gestures to quickly set camera offsets - one finger pan for panning the view, two finger pan for moving up/down/left/right, three finger pan moves forward/backward/left/right!
* new quick view UI on the main screen for storing offsets as quick views!