Cool to see this, it's a cool in-between step for not having additional wraparound screens or a VR headset.
I used to run a similar software[1] for when I was really into playing F1 racing games. However one of the problems I found was the initial disconnect in your head and eye movement that took some getting used to.
For example, if you want to look left to see an upcoming turn, naturally your eyes move before your head, and your head follows after.
With this software enabled, you have to consciously inverse the process where your head moves a direction, but your eyes still remain looking forward at the screen.
It took a some getting used to and resulting in some dizziness afterwards, but was fun.
It's completely replaced my TrackIR 5, since it averts the need to wear headphones and dig out the tracking bracket every time I want to use it, and the accuracy feels about the same.
I found head tracking pretty much becomes second-nature after a while - to the point at which it feels weird to play first-person sims without it. Not quite as fancy as VR, but much more comfortable and much more practical.
Head tracking's great, the reasons it became a niche thing are easy to overcome in 2026. I've been churning out loads of decoupled look+aim head tracking mods for non-sims with this in mind (all OpenTrack compatible) - https://github.com/itsloopyo#the-mods
Ooh, awesome. I was literally just thinking the other day that it was a shame on-foot head tracking games pretty much started and ended with ArmA 3, because it's great both for situational awareness, and for just plain gawping at stuff.
I second how awesome head tracking is for simming. Feels somewhat natural after a short adjustment period.
Last time I tried it there were still some problems (combinations of face pitch adjustment and z-axis translation resulted in weird camera movements in-sim IIRC) that makes me hesitate to call it fully natural, but some of it could probably be a filtering/configuration issue.
It's also fully possible TrackIR suffers from the same issue!
Do you really prefer webcam + opentrack over the trackir? Asking because I literally have a trackir on the way to me in the mail, and most discussions I could find were at least 2-3 years old.
I have had a TrackIR 5 since pretty much release which I used religiously for flight siming. I also have a tobii eye tracker. I have pretty much stopped using the trackir entirely now in favour of the eye tracker + opentrack. It is incredible, works flawlessly. You have a very small amount less horizontal turn tracking, but honestly your head has to be comically side on for you to notice the difference. Perfectly smooth and predictable. Lately been using it in Nuclear Option and it’s changed the game. TrackIR also works great, and is also flawless, but the key difference is the eye tracker requires zero hardware on your head to work. Even works through glasses.
That said, I have had issues with opentrack that involved some mildly irritating troubleshooting. Namely X4: Foundations didn't work properly with the standard freetrack output regardless of how I configured it, and I ended up needing to use "UDP over network".
I've never had a comparable problem with TrackIR, in spite of using it with a wider variety of titles over a longer period. I do kinda like having it as a backup in case more intractable problems crop up.
I set up a basic nose tracker to do the same thing in beamNG just for left/right motion a long while ago, just to see if it was usable. The neat thing there was that you could also just translate your head to get the same effect and didn't need to move your eyes at all. Feels even weirder though lol.
Not the person you're asking, but I can answer from my own experience: No. There's a big difference between looking at a monitor and looking out a real car window. Your brain can tell.
I'm somewhat confused to why Google needed to open source the original Pebble source code for this project to exist?
Was it not possible to already create a comparible e-ink screen, long life battery, smart watch without the source code? Is it the pebble branding itself that is important somehow?
Just basing things off of Android won't get you the "measured in days to weeks" battery life people appreciated about the Pebble, and building your own watch OS from scratch optimized for battery life but still supporting BLE connection to a phone sounds like a great way to spend several years.
It's really really difficult to make a full smartwatch OS that's nice to use. The closest OSS one I've seen (and also worked on) is InfiniTime for PineTime, it's great but it still needs tons of work. Now imagine you have an ecosyste people have built for years. It's such a massive difference.
And this isn't some esoteric use case used as an excuse. The core need the author has is "export my diagram to SVG and have it render the same in all browsers".
That's probably by historical incident. I'm a big advocate of open source design tooling, and I think the reason they haven't taken off as much is because design tools are generally ignored by developers. We spend loads of free time building open source developer tools, but there doesn't seem to be as much excitement as building solutions for the design side.
There's an element of that, but I think design tools tend to be ignored by designers as well. It took well over a year to get my last design team to even consider looking at Figma seriously. I've worked with several that have big gaps in understanding their day to day software. To some degree the issue can be lock in, but people also just seem to want get in and bang something out, even if the process is sub-optimal (and that can be valid.)
I've used several tools over the years and am not afraid to jump into a new UI or workflow, but have come to believe that's an exception and probably driven by the dev part of my brain.
Yeah I can see this. I think Figma might have changed the culture a bit, though that perception could be driven by the more vocal explorers on Twitter who post about new features and such.
It could be that much of design tool "output" is source-of-falsity, i.e. experiments, drafts, non-production work that is left in an ideation stage. For stuff like that, there's more breathing room for less-sophisticated products to shine.
Penpot is pretty great even in production environments. It hews much closer to web standards in for things like layout (flexbox and grid), supports working completely offline and doesn’t use a proprietary file format.
What they don’t have is the inertia of Figma and being as-good-as or maybe a little better isn’t enough to get the traction they need.
I sincerly hope that they remove this feature and apologise for its integration in the first place.
I don't think a reference website should include any sort of feature that can hallucinate incorrect documentation for you on demand.
It's bad enough that they have to include a disclaimer[1] on their upsell page, which states that the "AI Help" may occassionally return incorrect results.
Please no. The site is an important resource for people learning JS and other web technologies and AI is great at explaining code snippets which would otherwise be follow-up look-ups and at explaining what the often very dense MDN content means. And AI is actually really good at generating code as well, you just have to review it like it was written by a junior dev.
I think most of the hate for current AI tools comes from the fact that people expect the computer from Star Trek which always provides perfect answers.
Edit: So yes, it needs to be made super obvious to users that it might give you wrong answers.
I'm really not sure how you can argue that "AI is great at explaining code snippets" while also acknowledging that it will just give you flat out wrong answers some times.
Either it's good at explaining and is right, or is bad at explaining and is wrong.
Applying the logic of it being "right most of the time" seems really bad for a tool applied to a reference documentation website.
Sorry, if that wasn't clear but I think MDN is not only reference documentation. I agree, for the reference part the AI shouldn't do more than trying to point you to the right parts of the text. But for learning things, nice explanations, even if sometimes slightly off, can be a lot better to digest than reference documentation.
I'm not saying it's great yet, but there is potential for having something that can hand-wave away some details like a human would when explaining something to a beginner.
I used to run a similar software[1] for when I was really into playing F1 racing games. However one of the problems I found was the initial disconnect in your head and eye movement that took some getting used to.
For example, if you want to look left to see an upcoming turn, naturally your eyes move before your head, and your head follows after. With this software enabled, you have to consciously inverse the process where your head moves a direction, but your eyes still remain looking forward at the screen.
It took a some getting used to and resulting in some dizziness afterwards, but was fun.
[1]: https://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htm