Gaming Daily A-Z

So unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the new VR-google craze soon to hit every hard-core gamers cave (e.g. Occulus Rift ). We talked about the FOSS engine getting Occulus support before , and now that id software promised to release the Doom3 BFG Edition source code too, it looks like VR in FOSS games will become quite common soon. However, hidden in the (flight-)sim genre another quite nice system has been developed, using only a (sufficient frames per second) webcam: The video is shot with FlightGear , everyones favorite open-source flight-sim. More details how to get it running with FlightGear can be found here , the system itself is not FlightGear specific though. The source-code can be found here to be adapted to to your game (any 3D game that doesn't require too fast head-movement is basically suitable). The face-tracking is based on OpenCV , which will take some juice from your idling quad-core CPUs ;) Less resource demanding are infrared LED

FaceTrackNoIR ( download ) enables a user to use any webcam,by moving their head very slightly, to control the free-look/xyz movement of any game, through joystick emulation via PPjoy for Windows or directly when the game developer has included support. Very popular with space/flight simulation community, this technology can be used with FPSs/3rd person RPGs as well. FaceTrackNoir uses the protocol developed for FreeTrack, among others , including FlightGear's own. Webcams known to work well with FaceTrackNoIR. Normally this type of control through head movement was very expensive, and required specialised IR cameras/lights/markers to acquire raw data which was processed through closed source software and sent to games via protocols like TrackIR, being aimed at the high end simulation users. The FreeTrack opensource project used cheap but specialised equipment, wrote their own processing software and sent the data to games via reverse engineered TrackIR protocol/FreeTrack pr