alt Hacker Newsopentrack would be the one to beat these days: https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack
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.
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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.
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