Sony’s headphones come with some neat hardware designed for its own specially implemented spatial audio system. But on PC, that hardware often goes unused. That is, until now.
As posted to Reddit by user NSlattery43, you can now use the motion sensors in the likes of the Sony WH-1000XM5, WF-1000XM5, and ULT Wear headphones for head tracking in games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elite Dangerous, and Assetto Corsa.
Slattery made their own open-source software and posted it to GitHub, which means you can not only use it entirely for free but also build on it in new ways or fine-tune it. The way it works is that it catches the live orientation and gyroscopic data from your buds or headphones, then passes it over to head tracking software OpenTrack, which then connects to games. It doesn’t require a webcam, infrared tracker, or any other hardware/software to get running.
To get it to work, simply download the software via GitHub, pair any compatible Sony device, open the application, and then use OpenTrack whilst the game is on to link the input. You may run into a problem with Sony devices failing to make the head tracking node, but the software has an option to register the tracker if so.