MacOpentrack

Opentrack is an open-source project originally created by Wim Vriend and now maintained and developed by Stanisław Halik and many others.

Quote:

opentrack is an application dedicated to tracking user's head movements and relaying the information to games and flight simulation software. opentrack allows for output shaping, filtering, and operating with many input and output devices and protocols; It allows for output shaping, filtering, and operating with many input and output devices and protocols; the codebase runs Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX (currently unmaintained), and GNU/Linux.

I've highlighted the part saying that the macOS version is currently unmaintained. Here's where I and MacOpentrack now come into play. During the last year or so I've been digging deep into the source code in order to get opentrack back to the Mac. When I was looking for current macOS binaries I did not find anything useful so I tried to compile it myself. Building a basic version wasn't too hard, but getting the interesting modules (neuralnet-tracker, point-tracker and Wine-support) to work as well was a lot of work - at least for me. Also there were some specific bugs or shortcomings in the macOS codebase that needed to be fixed before opentrack really became useful to me. Furthermore the included X-Plane plugin needed some tweaks and is now compatible with X-Camera.

Let me highlight the use cases and features:

• Use your Mac's built-in camera or other cameras supported by macOS and let the neuralnet-tracker track your face movement without additional hardware or costs.
• For the very best experience use the point-tracker module for IR-Tracking (highly recommended) with an IR-camera and a Head-Clip. For instance DelanEngineering's "Delan Cam 1" IR-camera and their head-clips aka DelanClips are known to work perfectly with the help of my DelanCamUtil.
• Use the included X-Plane 11/12 plugin to start head-tracking in X-Plane on macOS right away.
• Use the Wine-integration feature to feed head motion data to Windows-games you run via wine-based products*.
• Use other apps on your smartphone such as SmoothTrack that can track your head's movement and let them pass it to MacOpentrack via network (UDP).

As it should be all my code-changes and fixes are made available in my fork on GitHub. Some of them had already been merged into the original codebase. You're welcome to review the code and build the software yourself. However since it is not a trivial task I kindly ask you to support me by purchasing pre-built MacOpentrack binaries from me directly here at gumroad. They are digitally signed by me and notarised (checked by apple for malicious content). They're optimised for Apple-Silicon but work on intel-Macs as well. You can pay what you want!

For more information please also check my How-To Guide on Head-Tracking I published on DelanCam's blog.

I'd like to close with a quote of cavu360 on the X-Plane-Forums commenting on being now able to use IR-Tracking using DelanClip and my pre-built Opentrack binaries:

[...], we are at that point of extremely usable and really a lot of fun! The smoothness and solid connection to my movement is stunning! It looks and feels entire natural (for the very first time). I have to say it again ... not ever before has any face tracking come anywhere near close to how good this latest build of point tracking that you've created performs! And Tomasz's Delan Clip Fusion Pro is an amazing and extremely well built device. Together with your accomplishments with OpenTrack and his hardware solution I am eager to say this is GAME CHANGING for us Mac users.

Happy flying/tracking and thank you for your support.

System-Requirements: Intel or Apple-Silicon Mac with macOS Sonoma or Sequoia. The reason is that the QT libraries require Sonoma. I plan trying to make a build for older macOS versions.

Known Issue: The sliders in the filter-settings behave weirdly. Just ignore them moving around in unexpected ways and monitor the values displayed next to them. This is a bug in the QT5 libraries. QT6 allegedly solves this, but opentrack has not moved to QT6 yet. It does not stop you from making and saving adjustments.

You can get a 5% discount for DelanClip products using this link.

* I have successfully tested the Wine-integration feature with stock wine-stable 9.0 (installed via homebrew or MacPorts) and Falcon BMS. I could not get it to work with the latest CrossOver, other tools like Whisky and Wineskin might work, but I haven't tested them yet.