Head Tracking Preferences

Camera-based head tracking lets the binaural image stay locked to the world rather than to your head — turn left and the centre channel stays in front of the screen, the way it does with real speakers. The Head Tracking panel selects which camera to use, lets you preview what the tracker sees, and tunes the sensitivity of yaw, pitch, and roll independently. For background on the head-tracking feature, see Head Tracking.

Camera

A grid of every camera AVFoundation reports on the system: the built-in FaceTime camera, any USB or Continuity Camera devices you've connected, plus iPhones running Continuity Camera. Each card shows the camera's name — with (Front) or (Back) appended for built-in cameras — and an icon for its type; external cameras show just their name.

Selecting a different camera restarts the tracker process automatically — there's no separate "apply" button.

Preview

Show Camera Preview — toggles the live camera feed inside the panel, with the tracker's pose detection drawn on top.

When the preview is on, Orbit launches the head-tracking subprocess (a separate process that runs Apple's Vision face-detection pipeline) and displays its output. You'll see your face in real time with coloured overlays:

• Green outline — detected face bounds
• Cyan dots — eye landmarks
• Yellow — nose tip
• Red — face centroid (the point used to derive head pose)

A small text legend in the panel reproduces this colour key so you don't have to remember it.

The preview is mainly a setup aid — you turn it on to confirm the tracker is seeing your face cleanly (good lighting, framing, no occlusion from headphones or hair), then turn it off for normal use to save the small amount of CPU it costs.

Tracker output

A read-only display below the preview, shown while Show Camera Preview is on, that reports what the tracker is seeing. Two columns:

• Raw — the unscaled yaw, pitch, and roll angles in degrees, as detected from your face.
• Scaled — the same values multiplied by the sensitivity sliders below.

Below them, an Updates: N count ticks up as new frames arrive — useful for confirming the pipe is alive — beside a status: Waiting for tracker... while it starts, Receiving once data is flowing, Tracker: … when the tracker reports its own status (a problem such as a camera permission issue shows here), Stopped, or Enable camera tracking in main app.

Sensitivity

Three sliders that scale the raw tracker angles before they're applied to the binaural rendering. All three default to a slight over-exaggeration of real-world head movement (1.5×, 1.5×, 1.0×) which feels more responsive in practice than 1:1 mapping.

Yaw — left/right rotation. Range 0.5–3.0×, step 0.1, default 1.5×.

Pitch — up/down nodding. Range 0.5–3.0×, step 0.1, default 1.5×.

Roll — head tilting side-to-side. Range 0.5–3.0×, step 0.1, default 1.0× (most listeners don't move their heads in roll much, so a smaller multiplier is more natural here).

Reset to Defaults restores the 1.5× / 1.5× / 1.0× factory values for all three at once.

TIP

If the spatial image feels "stuck" when you turn your head, increase Yaw. If turning your head pulls the image too far the other way, decrease it. The sweet spot is the value where the centre channel stays locked to the screen with no perceived drag.

See also

• Head Tracking — the feature guide, including required camera permissions and known limitations.
• Monitoring — head tracking is only audible in Binaural mode (and in Apple Spatial Audio with its own native head tracking, independent of this panel).