Head Tracker (archived) • supperware

I developed some head trackers for audio-only VR applications. They are patent pending and are now in early-stage production.

Headline figures

3 degrees of freedom with precision better than one degree. (6 degrees of freedom mode is being researched, but I’m not promising it.)
Choice of 10ms or 20ms sensor processing (50 or 100Hz).
USB MIDI class compliant, and can also be used with a UART for embedded applications.
Output as quaternions, Tait-Bryan angles (yaw-pitch-roll), or a transformation matrix.
Simple gestures for zeroing or calibrating.

This is not a mockup. These DT-990s really report the wearer’s head orientation to within a fraction of a degree, up to 100 times per second. The head tracker took a minute to install, and is completely enclosed by the headband padding,

Resources for people on the alpha programme

Universal upgrader

This program accepts any head tracker, of any version, figures out what it needs, and upgrades it to the pre-production specification. Run it and let it tell you what to do.

macOS release (bootloader version 1.11; firmware version 0.53)
Windows release (bootloader version 1.11; firmware version 0.53). If your computer complains about a missing dll, you will need to install the latest Microsoft C++ redistributable.

The Supperware Firmware Tool and binary image are no longer required. (In case you need them, they’ve been moved to the Legacy Downloads section of the release notes page.)

Documentation

If you’re a programmer, the MIDI specification is what you need to communicate with the head tracker.

Here’s the new one (that works with 0.50 and onwards).
Here’s the legacy one (that was written for previous versions).

There are also release notes to tell you what has been fixed or changed since the last version you downloaded.