SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: TrackIR3 in Motorsport Sims

In racing sims you don't usually have to follow your opponents through the air, spotting the other cars zooming past overhead and below you. Well, perhaps you do if you're in a pick-up race in VROC at Monza. The dreaded turn 1 syndrome, where everyone tries to win the race at the first turn, often resulting in flying cars and complete mayhem.

Racing sims like F1 Challenge and GTR have an inbuilt"look-to-apex", or glance view where your view follows the steering wheel. Turn right and the view moves to the right and vice versa. These functions are attempts at increasing immersion by letting the driver feel even more that it's a real car that he or she is navigating through the twists and turns.

One problem I have found with these additions is that if I have to counter-steer, I usually loose my sense of direction and become very confused as to which way the car is heading, so generally I am very cautious in the use of such add-ons.

With the announcement of SimBin's GTR supporting NaturalPoint's TrackIR3 and Vector Expansion, and the arrival of EA's NASCAR SimRacing which also supports TIR3 and 6 DOF (degrees of freedom), the question "is it working right in racing sims?" — with "right" meaning "will it be more than a fancy gimmick?" — was raised.

Enter TrackIR3 and Vector Expansion that let's you control when the view is to change, simply by moving your head. On the NaturalPoint web site you can see what sims and games are currently supporting TrackIR3 and to what degree. For a full listing, go here.

The 6 degrees of freedom available are:

Yaw: Look left / right
Pitch: Look up / down
Roll: Look tilted angles
Lean: Lean left / right
Shrug: Lean up / down
Zoom: Lean in / out

During the SimHQ review of EA's NASCAR SimRacing, we discovered that none of the reviewing team had a TrackIR3.

But with the help of some friends, I learned that a TrackIR3 unit had been dispatched to me and 2 or 3 days later UPS had raced their truck to the suburbs of Copenhagen. I installed it right away.

Installation

Installation is very straight forward and it took me more time to open the box than it did to get TIR up-and-running! Install drivers, plug the unit into the USB port, place the unit somewhere suitable (I chose to place it on top of my CRT) enable Vector Expansion and I was off to the races.

Candidly, my opinion at the time was I would have rated a good third-party pedal system with accelerator, brake and clutch and perhaps a handbrake as well for good measure ahead of TrackIR3 in the list of items to acquire in order to enjoy my sim racing hobby to the fullest.

I felt very much the nerd donning the TrackIR3 cap with the clip while wearing my dEmporium sweatshirt, jacket and SimSox! If you think it was too hot to wear all that, let me just tell you that we've had a fairly cold winter here; -20 degrees Celsius. [Editors note: "fairly cold" Jens? Brrrr!]

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