Unintuitive behaviours around limits

[Leonardo Valeri Manera]

There are some … unintuitive and unnatural behaviours around the view limits, where I think the user experience would be improved if the EyeX simulated the behaviour of a human’s head & neck instead of a raw gimballed camera.

For example.

Sit straight.

Look 90 off to the right side above your shoulder.

Now rotate your head so you’re looking straight up.

Continue past the vertical till you’re looking 90 off to the left.

Unless you’re an alien or a robot with you’ll probably start by looking sideways, smoothly transition to looking straight up, and then smoothly transition to looking sideways, because that’s the most comfortable movement due to how the human neck is made.

However, currently the EyeX in that situation would look sideways until it reached apex right above your head, rotate the view 180 degrees around the vertical axis, and then look sideways from the apex down to the other side.

Basically, if you plotted the lateral and vertical angles of view orientation for such a motion, the natural motion is a sine curve while the current motion is a step.

This is especially noticeable in game profiles that have a sideways maximum angle greater than the vertical angle – which I imagine is the vast majority of them.

In these cases you can find yourself in a lock situation where you’re looking straight up (and sideways) and to change your view to looking to the other side you have to force yourself to rotate the view.

If you keep looking ‘up’ the current model thinks you want to rotate the view laterally past the maximum and locks in place, rather than panning the view past the vertical to the other side as one would expect.

Thus I propose 2 behaviours to make view panning when looking straight up/down more natural.

#1: as the vertical angle passes 45 (or some configurable value) from the horizontal, the lateral component is smoothly removed until all views within say, 5 degrees of vertical only use up/down inclination and not lateral inclination.

There’s some possible issues if there’s ever any game where a view up/down angle greater than 120 is required, but in that case one can just disable this – either at the user or profile level.

The 45 from horizontal angle should allow natural level view of objects to the side of the player avatar, such as the various virtual panels in E:D.

#2: When the profile has lateral limits greater than the vertical limits, make the co-ordinate space contiguous, as opposed to the current discontinuous.

If I was able to make videos I’d show the motion with a head tracker vs the EyeX, but I can’t …

[James Harford]

I have had similar thoughts about. I Haven’t read your suggestions in full but your description of the problem seems spot on! My only question to Tobii is if the game API allows this to be done?

[Hei Sogeki]

From your description it seems our issues are related. My issue is specifically the rectangular boundaries that are set by ISE. It would be infinitely more natural if the boundaries were ovoid, rather than rectangular. I think the issue would be solved if there were an option in the view angle limits section of ISE that could round the corners of this rectangular boundary. If the boundary is elliptical, it should also mask the discontinuity you spoke of.

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//Video showing unnatural view limits
Shows the headlook boundaries with my reduced view angle limits, then I try to mimic a head tracking device’s “intuitive” or natural view range, then to simulate tracing a ship flying overhead.

youtu.be/WXiTGMVkrm4

————————————-
//Discord conversation of the issue:

Hei Sogeki – Today at 6:01 PM
Hey, does anyone know if the corners of the headlook range can be rounded?

Orange Spark – Today at 6:01 PM
what do you mean

Hei Sogeki – Today at 6:03 PM
I just got the tobii eyeX. I turned the pitch and yaw range down in the device’s settings so I don’t twist my character’s head off and I don’t look too far away from my hud when tracing enemy pilots in battle.
The problem is when I look around at my peripherals, the headlook cam traces a square. I’d rather the corners of that square be rounded, so it’s more like rolling your head around irl.
Instead of “tilts head in a vertical line – hard stop – turns horizontal line – hard stop – down vertical – stop – etc.”
Just wondering if there was already a mod that can alter the vjoy range for head tracking / eye tracking devices
Or if the range was accessible in a game file, similar to the way you can change your hud color

Orange Spark – Today at 6:10 PM
I don’t use a headtracking device so I’m afraid I can’t help you with this

Hei Sogeki – Today at 6:11 PM
Okay, I haven’t found anything via Google, so I thought I’d find an addon forum or post on frontier forums. Just stopped here first.
I’ll keep looking for now, but thanks.

Orange Spark – Today at 6:13 PM
IIRC @Pleijpje uses some sort of headtracking device
maybe he can help

Hei Sogeki – Today at 6:16 PM
?

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