Turn AirPods into a low-latency head tracker for flight simulators like DCS or MSFS via a Windows PC.
Drive X-Plane's head tracking directly on a single Mac without needing a second gaming PC.
Test and calibrate head tracking using the built-in 3D web viewer before launching a game.
Run AirTracker headless from the command line for scripted or diagnostic use.
| crippler95/airtracker | aakarsh-goyal/macjuice | altuzar/sonicflow | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Language | Swift | Swift | Swift |
| Setup difficulty | moderate | easy | easy |
| Complexity | 3/5 | 1/5 | 2/5 |
| Audience | general | general | general |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires macOS 14+, compatible AirPods, and OpenTrack installed on the machine running the game.
AirTracker is a small menu bar app for Mac that turns your AirPods into a head tracker for games. It reads the motion sensors already built into supported AirPods models through an Apple system feature, then sends that head movement out using the OpenTrack protocol, which many flight simulators, racing games, and truck simulators already know how to read to move the in game camera as you turn your head. This only works on a Mac running macOS 14 or later, since Apple is the only platform that lets an app read motion data from AirPods this way, and it only supports AirPods models with spatial audio head tracking, such as AirPods 4, AirPods 3, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, or Beats Fit Pro. There are two ways to actually use it while gaming. The common setup is a Mac paired with a separate Windows gaming PC on the same network: AirTracker runs on the Mac, reads your AirPods, and sends the tracking data over the network to a tool called OpenTrack running on the Windows PC, which feeds it into the game. The other option is running both AirTracker and OpenTrack on the same Mac, which works for the smaller number of Mac games that support this kind of head tracking, such as X-Plane. Once set up, AirTracker offers a recenter button and keyboard shortcuts to reset your head position, full control over which sensor axis maps to which movement and how sensitive it is, a way to soften small unintentional movements, and slow drift correction so your view does not slowly creep off center during a long play session. It also includes a built in web page that shows a live 3D head moving along with you, useful for testing the setup before launching a game, and it can run headless from the command line for scripted or automated use. You install it by downloading a ready built app from the releases page, or you can build it yourself from source using Xcode and Swift on macOS. It is written in Swift and inspired by a similar project built for Sony headphones. The README does not state which license the code is released under.
A macOS menu bar app that turns supported AirPods into a low-latency head tracker for flight simulators and other games via OpenTrack.
Mainly Swift. The stack also includes Swift, CoreMotion, OpenTrack.
No license information is stated in the README.
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly general.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
Verify against the repo before relying on details.