opentrack
Head Tracking for Windows
by opentrack project
opentrack tracks your head with a webcam, an infrared clip, a phone or a joystick and feeds the movement to games as six-axis camera control. It outputs to Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane, FlightGear, any FreeTrack or TrackIR-compatible title, a virtual joystick or SteamVR. The 2026.1.0 Windows installer is about 190 MB because it bundles the neural network tracker.
About opentrack
opentrack is the open-source alternative to TrackIR. It reads your head position and rotation, six degrees of freedom in total (yaw, pitch, roll and X, Y, Z translation), and sends them to a game so the in-game camera follows your real head. Lean in to read a gauge or glance over your shoulder, and the view moves with you.
The input side is flexible. The NeuralNet tracker works with any ordinary webcam and no markers. PointTracker uses an infrared LED clip or cap with a modified webcam for the precision TrackIR users expect. ArUco tracks a printed marker, and there are inputs for a joystick, an Arduino running Hatire firmware and UDP data from a phone app.
On the output side opentrack speaks the FreeTrack and TrackIR protocols that most flight and racing sims already understand, plus native SimConnect for Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane and FlightGear plugins, a vJoy virtual joystick and SteamVR. Every axis gets a separate curve, deadzone and smoothing setting, so a small head movement can map to a large or a tiny camera move.
Version 2026.1.0 for Windows comes as a single setup .exe. Linux and macOS builds exist but are compiled from source. The project is licensed under ISC and the code is on GitHub; a webcam you already own is enough to try it before buying any tracking hardware.
