Head Tracking for Flight & Truck Sims
Head tracking lets you look around a cockpit by moving your head — checking a wing in DCS, glancing at a mirror in ETS2, scanning for traffic on final in MSFS. The free software at the centre of most setups is OpenTrack: it reads a camera or tracker, smooths the motion, and outputs it in a form your game can use. vJoy enters the picture when a game has no tracking input of its own but does accept joystick axes: a feeder chain (commonly OpenTrack into FreePIE, writing to a vJoy device) turns head movement into virtual axes the game already understands.
Start here
- OpenTrack + FreePIE + vJoy head tracking — the full free chain, set up step by step, including when you do and do not need vJoy in it.
- Head tracking compared — every rung of the ladder below, compared honestly per game.
- vJoy for DCS World — merging controls for DCS, where head tracking matters most.
- vJoy for ETS2 — truck-sim camera and steering setups, and what ETS2 does natively without vJoy.
The upgrade ladder
Start free. A webcam plus OpenTrack costs nothing and is genuinely good enough for many simmers. The paid rungs buy convenience and tracking quality, in this order:
- Free — webcam + OpenTrack. The setup guide above gets you flying today.
- Delanclip (paid, small UK shop). An infrared clip plus camera, built for OpenTrack — the tracking-quality jump most OpenTrack users make first. We recommend it as readers ourselves; Delanclip runs no affiliate programme, so this link-free recommendation earns us nothing.
- TrackIR 5 (paid). The long-running dedicated tracker with its own software — the default recommendation for DCS and MSFS pilots who want a finished product.
- Tobii Eye Tracker 5 (paid). Head plus eye tracking with no headwear at all, strongest in the games that support it natively, such as Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous.
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New to vJoy itself? Get the verified builds from the download page first — the head-tracking chain sits on top of a working vJoy install.