Revisiting Tobii in MSFS - Solutions and Alternatives

[Music] hi everyone and welcome back I'm Kurt and today we're going to do a little follow up on that Toby it tracker video from last month that one got a lot of attention which is great there were a lot of people who disagreed with me and that was expected and that was the discussion that I wanted to have my Hope was that someone might tell me something that would solve my problems with the Toby but that didn't really happen however an unexpected chain of events did lead me to some meaningful solutions that I wanted to share for those of you that have a Toby and were having some of the same problems I was stick with me here in this video and we'll come back to uh to what I discovered and how to set it up in a few minutes however if you don't already have a Toby I want to reiterate that I still don't think the Toby is a great value for flight Sim I'm happy I found a way to make mine work so at least I can get some value for money I already spent but I still think if you're just looking for a flight Sim head tracker Toby's probably not a great choice unless you have $300 you just can't stand to keep in your pocket um like I said at the end of the previous video if you have the budget and you don't care go nuts it's not that it's a bad product it's just that the price is bad so let's get into the story of how this all came together and before I do I want to tell you I'm going to talk a bit about a product here that wasn't my ultimate solution but it might work for some of you that haven't already spent money on a Toby learning about how this all works is how I got my Toby to behave the way that I wanted and that probably never would have happened had I not received an email several days after I published that Toby video I was contacted by the developers of the beam it tracker which is a program that uses a webcam or a smartphone to provide similar functionality to the Toby however since they're just using your webcam or your smartphone it's software only this video is not going to be a review of that software and I want to be clear that they're not sponsoring me and they aren't paying me to mention them they gave me a free license key for their software so that I could check it out and I did check it out I don't have a really Speedy webcam but I do have an older Logitech that runs 720p at about 30 frames per second and for those of you that don't know the face tracking camera in the Toby is also Al about 30 frames per second the ey tracking is much faster be ey tracker claims to go up to 120 frames per second on a camera that can do it and I have to admit that'd be pretty cool if that's uh if that's true but I don't have a camera that goes that fast so I wasn't really able to test that but the software does what it says it does it does face an ey tracking and while I didn't test it for a long session that did perform pretty well my understanding is that the free version will do head and ey tracking and you really only need to buy a license if you're going to get into additional data or if you want analytics and things so basically for free you could have a solution that might do what you want comparing with the Toby the main thing that I noticed is that the Toby works better in low light and that's because it has an infrared camera but otherwise the Bei tracker keeps up just fine if you want to check it out there will be a link in the description that link does have some data in it that identifies my channel as the source of your click and that helps my channel a bit so if you check it out please use that link however I also understand that some people are sensitive to tracking links so if you don't trust the link you can also just go to steam and search for the beam I tracker and now we're getting to the meat of the solution for those of you that are unhappy with your Toby's behavior in flight simulator be my tracker uses open track as a middleware of sorts and if you're not familiar with open track it's a free open- source driver for these types of camera software while testing with the Bey tracker I noticed that I had the exact same problem that I have with Toby where my head movements don't always make sense but since open track offers a lot of configuration options I figured I'd start clicking around and I found a setting that caused everything to start working the way that I wanted and while digging around in the menus I also discovered an option to use the Toby as the camera input and so I did and boom all of a sudden my Toby worked the way that I wanted so what I wanted to show here was the difference between the way that the Toby implementation works in Microsoft flight simulator versus the way open TR did it if I look over here there's this guy who walks in and out of the scene uh I can't see him right now but anyways um he'll be along if I look to the side like this and then I try to lean myself uh that way which would be you know toward the front of the airplane what you get instead is it moves me away from the window and the reason for that is if you're looking at the camera view of me it's as if the camera was out there on the propeller right and in that view then what really did happen was that I moved my head this way and so it moved my head this way but since you're using this Amplified head mode motion like you know I move my head to here and I'm looking there's my guy um I'm looking 90° to the side even though you know I'm looking about 20° off axis uh in the real world as you see on the camera so since there's no handling for that what happens is every time you want to see where that guy went and you do the natural motion like this it zooms you back rather than moving your head toward the dashboard which is what you were trying to do in the open track settings under options you enable relative translation there is no similar option for this in the Microsoft flight simulator handling for the uh for the toby and that's the game changer right there you turn that one on now if I go over here see this guy if I want to see more what's going on I lean over a little bit now I've moved toward the dash that's what I would expect because that's the way my head position is if I look over here same thing right let's say there was something behind this pillar I wanted to see if I leaned this way or leaned this way to look around it it works that's what I want um that's the thing that was causing me the biggest headache with trying to get the Toby set up and now that I've got a solution for it of course that's way better that's the main thing the other thing I wanted to talk about in here that you get uh by using open track instead of using the the built-in software if you go into mapping here in flight simulator in the default settings you have the little slider where you can set yaah and Pitch to you know 1.2 1.5 whatever uh multiplier you want to have on how much head motion equals whatever distance in your in your game and you know it's rudimentary but it's it's there I guess but so this is in particular so here we're looking at yah which would be you know my head motion this way this way and you can see the little ball here moves uh as I turn my head the scale on the bottom is how many degrees my head is moving and the scale up the side here is how far the view is moving so by moving this top guy like if we set it all the way out to here that would be linear so as I move my head the amount that the view changes is about the same which gets to be a problem when you want to look you know way behind the plane you got to turn your Headway back and then you can't really see your screen sliding this along here gives you the main multiplier and as you move it uh to the to the left it gets a um a stronger and stronger motion this guy and you can you can put multiple um additional curve points in here I believe yeah so what the other thing you can do here is if you want like I want the first part of this trans this translation to be kind of gentle and then it steepens a bit through here see and I've done that by adding this and you can pull this around to get whatever kind of curve you want to the translation and the purpose of this is that like you can see now because the way I've changed it because the way I've changed it now as I move my head very little happens at first and then it really amplifies as I get further overs so this is super nice um because when you're trying to look at your gauges or whatever they're not you know every little head motion see I can move my head quite a lot before I really get any meaningful motion on the well actually I did I didn't do pitch so that one moved fast but I don't really get any meaningful motion by moving my head so it's not really a dead zone it's just a Zone where the uh where the motion is is minimized super critical uh and it's also something else that you don't get in the default implementation of Toby and Microsoft flight simulator so you have one for yaw one for pitch now in Pitch I'm using this is here in yaw also this a symetric mapping but I don't want that in ya because I want my head movements to the left and the right to be the same but on Pitch I don't because I want a linear curve but Amplified so in this case I didn't really Bend this line at all it's pretty much straight but I don't want to have to you know try to look straight up because obviously I wouldn't be able to see the screen so I do need some amplification on this so in this case it's pretty linear though that way as I look upward I can easily kind of figure out you know where I am if I'm trying to find something that's outside the window here but if I want to look inside and this isn't such a big deal with the small planes like the sesy here but in the bigger Jets and things where you have a center console with uh radios and things down there if I look down I don't want to have to point my head way down because then I can't see my monitor that's out in front of me right so what I've done is Amplified have a different amplification for the pitch down and that's what this does so basically if I move my head up you'll see the dot appear here and it goes up and if I move my head down you see it's on this trajectory and this one's quite quite a bit steeper so what that allows me to do then is look down here and like this is the add-on 152 and it's got this little tablet and I can click my tablet very easily get to it and still keep my eye on the screen and see what I'm doing right whereas if it was linear I may not be able to do that and if I didn't have some control over how the initial motion works it might be overly sensitive which I don't want either uh similarly en roll which I've what I've done here is I've set it pretty minimal because I don't need a whole lot of this this you know but sometimes it's it's comfortable you know when you're trying to look you know at a crazy angle to be able to roll a little bit so I did want that and then in uh X Y and Z again you have all these controls so this is X is the side to side motion which it's fine you know I just left it one to one basically the Y motion is up and down and this one I split and what I did here and the reason why is you don't often find yourself like wanting to move way up you know what I was Finding was sometimes when I would tilt my head back the camera would register an upward movement and I think that's because my eyes it's really looking at your eyes and I think my eyes you know since they move up in the scene a little bit it was Translating that into a vertical motion that I didn't want so I tuned down the upward vertical quite a lot but I've got the downward vertical at 1: one and the reason for that is similar to why I have a different down motion on uh on my pitch but if I want to scrunch down to see something I don't want to have to like you know be a a contortionist to do it I just want to be able to you know do one of these and look and see now I can see what's underneath there so that's real Handy to leave that at one to one and then Z this is the zoom movement and in this case the top bar is the uh is the backward motion you see the ball moves on the one you're doing and the forward motion is the bottom one well I don't want the full motion because it gets to be a little too extreme going backwards I really didn't want very much at all because if I'm leaning back in my chair I don't really want my view to change but if I'm leaning forward I'm probably trying to look at something on the dash so in that case I wanted these to be a little different so this ability to set it asymmetric like that it doesn't exist at all in the Microsoft setup and again this is gamechanging for the Toby this is the kind of stuff you need to be able to do to really have a totally comfortable experience so with all that done you know when I look forward now I can get right in there if I need to look at a little gauge or something I can lean right in and see it if I lean back it doesn't change very much when I'm flying if I you know if I'm looking around a little bit like this my view is not all over the place which I couldn't get the Toby to do that because it either has a oh sorry my hands in front of the camera the Toby settings in in Microsoft flights emulator you can set a dead zone uh for the middle part and then it just doesn't move at all but you don't have that curve control that you can that you have in this software where I can set it so that you know these motions are real gentle like and if I move my head around just a little like this that's fine if I want to reach to a knob or whatever and I'm looking around if I move way over here okay I'm going to lose it but if I'm just sitting here and I'm moving my head you know the way my head normally moves while I'm doing things it stays right there pretty much so I'm able to to use the knobs I need to do and of course I still have the shut off if it if it's really being a problem but uh yeah this is this is way better and now I can move my head around and see what I want rather than getting weird was like that guy was looking back at me um so that's uh that's what I wanted to show you if you you got a Toby uh I think this will this will help you out a bit I think it's on par with the track I when I have it set up this way it's a huge Improvement I still don't think that Toby is worth the money for what it does in flight simulator so that's not a dis on the product it's a good product I just don't see it for flight simulator which is exactly what I said in the previous video but now using open track I've got it working in a way that I like and so I don't feel like I've wasted my money uh for those of you that have a toi and felt the same as I do I encourage you to check this out it could really save the device for you and make it a lot more enjoyable and for those of you who already like your Toby uh you may like it better if you try setting it up this way so give it a try but to all of you that are looking for some kind of head tracking and haven't spent $300 on a Toby uh if you have a webcam I think you'd be crazy not to check out be my tracker it'll do everything you need it does it really very well uh the only downside is that it's a little more sensitive to lighting um but if the light in your room is good you won't have a problem if you already have all the stuff check it out find out if it doesn't work get get something else thanks again for watching I hope you learned something today I know I did and we'll see you in the next one take care

Channel: KurtVW Sims and Such

Views: 5,215

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Id: 9vwCL08bO6c

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024