I was very much encouraged to buy a Pimax because of the positive attitude of Pimax official posts on this forum, and also the website mentions testing the Pimax 8K on motion simulators.
Full motion simulators have special requirements for head tracking. The tracking has to be relative to the moving cockpit platform, and not to the world. Gyros track your movement relative to the real world, this is not good for a motion sim! If you think this doesn’t make sense let me know and I will gladly explain.
I saw in another thread that the Pimax devs added the ability to disable the on-board gyros which is fantastic! What I want to know is what good options there are for head tracking with the Pimax 4K on a motion simulator and to what extent Pimax is interested in supporting use on full motion simulators.
You may be able to put a nolo base unit mounted to a stable (not shaking) pole mounted above your head on that 6DOF motion simulator. From that position, it would pick up your head movements relevant to the motion simulator and move appropriately.
It looks like you have the kind of hobby funds to give Pimax a try, and I would encourage you. I am a Prepar3d enthusiast, and this is the only headset out there that’s going to meet my minimum standards, and I am happy with it, even though I have recieved a BE model. You may like the BE model if it is shipped to you because of the vigorous motion imparted on you and the headset, it has an OLED screen and no ghosting. With either model I’d encourage you to try it and the NOLO with a mount above attached relevant to the motion.
Thanks guys! My budget is actually a bit tight, I spent the next couple years worth of it on my sim! =D
The big question on both of these options, is do they still use the gyro for rotational tracking? Positional tracking relative to the motion sim is no problem, but if gyros are still used for pitch, yaw, and roll I have a problem. I need optical tracking for all six DOF; pitch, roll, yaw, heave, sway, surge.
I just got it for 8.5 euro, unless the price has increased.
With the ping pong ball setup I get good tracking, but it is an absolute pain to configure. I think kinect is definitely the way to go.
I actually have a first gen kinect that I bought way back when DK1 was new, and then never did anything with it. I’ll have to see if I can do something with it. =)
It was working today moments ago and I haven’t had a problem with the NOLO forum recently. I did for a day weeks ago.
A long time ago I made a trackir type 3 LED head tracking attachment that I clipped on to some headphones. Or I think I actually made it right on to a cheap set. It was easy to make, I used a potentiometer with LEDs that could change colors depending on how much power they recieved. I used FreeTrackIR, I think it was that, and it worked great. No Gyro. I have often thought about digging this up from my storage boxes to scavenge the electronics and put it on my Pimax because I would like 6DOF and hate the drifting.
So, with that there is definitely a way for you to achieve what you want with no Gyro. You just need to mount the Camera somewhere on the motion simulator, make sure it doesn’t shake. And then place a 3 LED’s somewhere securely on the Pimax. It doesn’t have to be on the front or top. You just need to make sure the LEDs are secure in position relative to each other and visible to the camera. I am certain this solution will work for you, in theory ;). How responsive it to movement might matter, It’s been many years, older PC since I did this. Today it may be responsive enough, not that it wasn’t back then.
Excellent news thank you. It’s good to hear your confidence that I can get a working solution.
I ordered a nolo last night, before getting this message. If that doesn’t work I’ll check out your other suggestions.
I’m also going to try to track my hands as vr controllers, tried leap but it was no good in my cockpit. Had a hell of a time calibrating leap so maybe my unit I bought used its no good.
All I want is to see my hand position in VR, don’t need any other function from this.
I had trouble configuring my leap motion as well. I finally got that 85% or whatever the number was, after what seemed like half an hour. It seems to be an imperfect product with a lot of potential unrealized. I was actually thinking about that with your simulator, but because of the trouble I had, and that I am not aware if driving sims support it I did not mention it. There maybe a hack for just seeing hands in leapmotion. Using Prepar3d and FlyInside switches and even the yolk function, but lamely for me anyways. I should try to recalibrate and make it work better, i still have some time to send it back. If I do I’d just get another one with the VR mount, which I overlooked when I bought this one. It’s because they called it a VR Developer kit, which I am not officially a VR dev, so I just bought the regular one, but it doesn’t have the VR headset mount and some cables or something. Maybe the leap will work better for you not mounted on the headset for your purpose.
I think you’ll like the NOLO for whatever reason. I hope it works for you. It has built in gyros, but there may be a mode where they don’t use it. Pimax gyros need to be turned off to use NOLO and I thought it was because NOLO didn’t use gyros. but I just learned that NOLO has its own. Whether or not it must use it I don’t know. They seem to allow some hacking of it, so maybe it can be turned off.
That is bad news for me that nolo has gyros, as you say hope I can turn it off.
I will definitely try Kinect since I have one. There are issues of where to mount some of this stuff in my cockpit. I’ll also thinking nolo might not do for checking six and looking straight up but I mostly fly Huey so that should be fine.
I always liked Valve but now even more with their open source attitude. Compare that to oculus, and I hated Facebook to begin with.
maybe I can mechanically disable it, I don’t mind butchering it.