How TrackIR Became “Head Tracking”… and Then Stopped Moving

For a long time, if you said “head tracking” in a flight sim forum, what people actually heard was TrackIR.

Not “a head tracker”. Not “IR tracking”. Just TrackIR.

That did not happen because it was the only option. It happened because TrackIR arrived early, worked well enough, and convinced game developers to treat its interface as the standard. If a sim proudly said “TrackIR supported,” players knew exactly what that meant, and many went out and bought the hardware just for that badge.

And to be fair, TrackIR earned that reputation. In the early 2000s, being able to smoothly look around a cockpit by moving your head felt borderline magical. Compared to hat switches and mouse look, it was a revelation.

The problem is that the magic never really evolved.

TrackIR 5 is still, functionally, the TrackIR most people know. Same basic camera concept. Same requirement to clip something to your headset or wear reflectors. Same slightly awkward ritual of strapping yourself into hardware before you can even taxi. Software updates have happened, but the experience itself feels frozen in time.

Meanwhile, everything around it moved on.

Modern head tracking has quietly shifted towards “why is this even a thing I need to wear?” Products like TrackHat flip the old idea on its head by tracking your face directly with IR and computer vision. No clips. No cables dangling from your headset. No forgetting to put something on and wondering why nothing works. You sit down, you fly, it just works.

That shift exposes another part of TrackIR’s legacy that people are less nostalgic about.

For years, TrackIR’s dominance was reinforced not just by popularity, but by policy. Its SDK licence explicitly restricted developers from using TrackIR compatibility to enable competing products. Open-source projects and alternative trackers ran into legal pressure, and entire communities ended up reverse-engineering TrackIR protocols just to avoid touching the official ecosystem.

Whether you see that as reasonable IP protection or anti-competitive behaviour depends on your point of view. What is harder to argue with is the outcome. “TrackIR support” became synonymous with “head tracking support,” and innovation elsewhere slowed because compatibility itself was locked behind one brand.

Ironically, that same strategy now feels like an anchor.

Head tracking today is about reducing friction, not defending a standard from 2009. Players expect fewer accessories, simpler setups, and hardware that fades into the background. The idea that you must clip something to your head just to look around a cockpit feels increasingly dated.

TrackIR will probably always be the name people remember first. It built the category, and it deserves credit for that. But being the word everyone uses is not the same as being the product people actually want next.

And in a hobby obsessed with immersion, the future seems to belong to head tracking you forget is even there. That's where the TrackHat sensor V2 comes in. We worked hard to make a head tracking device that sets sim fans free of the constraints of IR point tracking technology, offering greater immersion, compatibility with more setups, and greater affordability and durability. So, for anyone considering head tracking, the time is now to check out how far the market has moved since the original TrackIR, and to see what the TrackHat sensor V2 can offer!

Learn more about the Trackhat sensor V2 here

TrackHat Sensor V2 head tracker

£120.00£96.00

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