I bought a DIY kit for an active LED head piece like the one at the top of this thread a couple of years ago when i was playing MSFS in a very bright environment and the TrackIR sensor kept losing the passive hat reflectors in all the light noise. It worked, but it didn't really resist that level of light pollution any better than the passive reflectors, and was more cumbersome, especially if you don't usually play with headphones to attach it to. I went back to the passive reflectors. Still have the active LED unit around here somewhere. I hope I remembered to take the battery out before I put it away.
The standard TrackIR setup is well made, reliable, and works as well as any of the alternatives. That's why it is still popular even though it is overpriced and hasn't been updated in several years. I know the price point is a turn-off for some, but all I can advise is to bite down hard and get it anyway. I use it with about 10 different sims and it provides good value for many when spread out thus. I just regret that almost no first-person RPG games adopted this tech. It would have made something like Fallout or Witcher more immersive. Basically, any genre of game that is now jumping into VR, could have been using head tracking for several years now, and it would make VR seem like not that big of a deal. Oh well.
That FaceTrackNoIR is intriguing, I wonder how well it works. Its web site doesn't seem to have been updated for about 15 years ("Now works with Win XP Vista!!") so I would have doubts about how up-to-date the app is, but that technology has a lot of promise, some of it pretty scary.
August