Sony Head Tracker for Windows

Use the motion sensors already inside compatible Sony headphones and earbuds as a real-time head tracker on Windows.

Unofficial open-source Windows bridge. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Sony.

Sony Head Tracker connects to the Android Head Tracker sensor exposed by supported Sony Bluetooth devices, reads live orientation and gyroscope data, and sends yaw, pitch, and roll to OpenTrack or your own applications.

No webcam, infrared tracker, additional hardware, firmware modification, or custom kernel driver is required.

Originally developed and tested for the Sony WH-1000XM5, the project now supports any compatible Sony headset that exposes the standard Android Head Tracker HID protocol.

If you arrived searching for Sony WH-1000XM5 head tracking on Windows, how to use WH-1000XM5 with OpenTrack, or an XM5 head tracker for Assetto Corsa or other sims, you are in the right place: the WH-1000XM5 is the reference device, and the same bridge now works across the wider Sony range.

What you can do with it

• Use compatible Sony headphones for head tracking in racing and flight simulators.
• Send live yaw, pitch, and roll to OpenTrack.
• Read orientation, quaternion, and gyroscope data through a local JSON stream.
• Inspect sensor activity through the included Windows diagnostics interface.
• Test additional Sony models with the read-only compatibility probe.

Quick start

1. Download sony-head-tracker.exe from the latest release (or build it yourself, it is one cl command).
2. Pair your compatible Sony headphones or earbuds through Windows 11.
3. Open the application. It automatically discovers compatible head-tracking sensors, displays live orientation data, and streams tracking output while it is open.
4. Starting the app for the first time on a fresh boot? Press Repair Tracker first. Windows very often pairs a Sony headset but does not create the head-tracker sensor node until something nudges it, so on a cold boot the app frequently shows nothing at first. Press the Repair Tracker button and approve the single administrator prompt. This is the normal first step, not a sign that anything is broken, and it is exactly what the button is for. After the app reopens, your headset should appear.
5. For games: in OpenTrack, select UDP over network as the input and use port 4242, then press Start. See OpenTrack.
6. For your own code: read one JSON object per sample from port 4243. See docs/PROTOCOL.md.
7. Press Recenter (or Ctrl+Alt+C) while facing forward.

Hardware status: changing orientation reports have been received and parsed from a physical WH-1000XM5. Behaviour varies with Sony firmware and the Windows Bluetooth stack. This project never spoofs another headset, changes Bluetooth identities, or modifies firmware.

Contents

• Quick start
• Compatibility
• Where the data goes (ports)
• Gyroscope and accelerometer
• Default orientation
• Build
• Pair the headphones
• Usage
• The GUI
• OpenTrack
• When the sensor won't show up
• Protocol and security notes
• Contributing
• License

Compatibility

Compatibility is determined by the protocol exposed by the headset, not simply by the Sony model name. A device is compatible when it exposes an Android Head Tracker HID sensor with the expected #AndroidHeadTracker# descriptor (usage 0x0020:0x00E1).

The underlying engine is protocol-based, although the project is currently focused on testing and supporting Sony headphones. In practice that means compatible Sony headphones, with experimental support for other devices using the same protocol.

You can check any device in seconds, with zero risk. Pair the headphones, then run:

sony-head-tracker.exe probe

probe is read-only. It never writes to the device, changes drivers, or touches firmware. If it finds a verified Android head tracker it prints the descriptor and exits 0. If not, it lists what it saw and exits 2.

Reports for both working and non-working devices are welcome. Please open an issue with the probe output and your Windows and firmware versions, and the table below will be updated.

Confirmed

Device	Reported by
Sony WH-1000XM5	maintainer, tested
Sony WH-1000XM6	community confirmed
Sony WF-1000XM6	community confirmed
Sony ULT WEAR (WH-ULT900N)	community confirmed

Candidate

Sony lists these models as supporting head tracking, but they still require community testing with this Windows implementation. Please do not assume they are already validated.

• Sony WF-1000XM5
• Sony LinkBuds Open (WF-L910)
• Sony LinkBuds Fit (WF-LS910N)
• Sony LinkBuds (WF-L900)
• Sony LinkBuds S (WF-LS900N)

A candidate model may still need the latest firmware before the sensor appears. Install Sony's Sound Connect app, connect the headphones, and update before probing.

Not compatible

Device	Status	Reported by
Sony WH-1000XM4	Does not work	community confirmed
Sony WH-1000XM3	Not expected to work	not on Sony's head-tracking list
Apple AirPods (all models, including AirPods Pro)	Not possible on Windows	see Why AirPods can't work

Models that are not on Sony's head-tracking list almost certainly carry no usable sensor. Bose QuietComfort Ultra models do head-tracked spatial audio and might one day expose a compatible protocol, but that is unverified and out of scope for now.

Why AirPods can't work (yet)

AirPods absolutely have the motion sensors, but Apple does not implement the Android Head Tracker HID protocol. Head tracking (and ANC control, ear detection, and so on) travels over Apple's proprietary accessory protocol (AAP) on a raw Bluetooth Classic L2CAP channel (PSM 0x1001). Two hard blockers follow:

1. Windows has no user-mode API for that channel. Desktop Windows exposes RFCOMM sockets to applications, but custom Bluetooth Classic L2CAP channels can only be opened by a kernel-mode profile driver (Microsoft's docs). That is how MagicPods does it on Windows: it ships a custom driver. This project's hard rule is that it never installs a custom kernel driver, so that path is out of scope here.
2. The head-tracking payload is not publicly documented. The LibrePods project has reverse-engineered much of AAP, but head-orientation packets remain unexplored territory even there.

What this bridge does instead: it recognises paired AirPods and tells you exactly this, in probe, in bridge, and in the GUI, instead of failing silently. If Windows ever exposes user-mode L2CAP, or a maintained open AAP bridge appears, an AirPods backend becomes feasible and contributions are welcome.

Where the data goes (ports)

In bridge mode (and while the GUI is open) head-tracking data is streamed over UDP to loopback (127.0.0.1) on two adjacent ports:

Port	Format	Consumer
4242 (--port)	Six little-endian doubles (x, y, z, yaw, pitch, roll)	OpenTrack "UDP over network"
4243 (--port + 1)	UTF-8 JSON object (see below)	Your own apps and scripts

Change the base port with --port N. The JSON port is always N + 1. The bridge prints both destinations on startup, and the GUI shows them along the bottom edge. Translation axes (x, y, z) are always zero, because this protocol reports orientation only.

The JSON datagram (one per sample, version: 2):

{
  "version": 2,
  "device": "WH-1000XM5",                  // connected headset's Bluetooth name, or null
  "rotationVector":  [x, y, z],            // axis-angle, radians
  "quaternion":      [w, x, y, z],         // recentered orientation
  "yprDegrees":      [yaw, pitch, roll],   // degrees
  "gyroscope":       [x, y, z],            // rad/s, or null if unavailable
  "accelerometer":   [x, y, z],            // m/s^2, or null if the device doesn't report it
  "angularVelocity": [x, y, z],            // deprecated alias of "gyroscope"
  "resetCounter":    0,
  "packetsPerSecond": 25.0,
  "receiveLatencyMs": -1.0                 // -1 when the device provides no timestamp
}

Security: UDP output is loopback-only by default and has no authentication. Do not bind or forward it to an untrusted network.

A full wire-format reference lives in docs/PROTOCOL.md.

Gyroscope and accelerometer

Both inertial streams are exposed in full, in addition to orientation:

• Gyroscope: angular velocity in rad/s, emitted as the JSON gyroscope array (and shown live in the GUI). This is the connected headset's on-board gyro as carried by the Android Head Tracker protocol.
• Accelerometer: linear acceleration in m/s^2, emitted as the JSON accelerometer array when the device reports it.

The Android Head Tracker HID profile that supported Sony firmware advertises defines only orientation and gyro fields, so on current firmware accelerometer is typically null. The bridge nonetheless parses the standard HID sensor-page acceleration usages (0x0453 to 0x0455, plus the vector form 0x0452) from every input report, so if your firmware exposes them they are surfaced automatically, with no code change needed. Gyro is likewise parsed from both the head-tracker custom field (0x0545) and the standard sensor-page usages.

Default orientation: YXZ, X and Z inverted

The default axis convention is YXZ order with the X and Z axes inverted, the mapping that produces correct head tracking on the WH-1000XM5. It is fully overridable:

• CLI: --axis-map XYZ (any permutation) and --invert X (any axes). The --invert flag is a complete override: --invert xz reproduces the default, --invert z inverts Z only, and --invert none clears all inversions.
• GUI: the axis-order dropdown (defaults to YXZ) and the Invert X/Y/Z checkboxes (Invert X and Z start checked).

The same axis convention is applied to the gyroscope and accelerometer vectors so all streams share one coordinate frame.

Build

Requires a C++20-capable MSVC and a current Windows 11 SDK (install Desktop development with C++ in the Visual Studio Installer).

build.cmd

build.cmd locates the Visual Studio C++ tools automatically. Or build by hand from a x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS:

rc /nologo app.rc
cl /std:c++latest /EHsc /permissive- /utf-8 /O2 /W4 /DUNICODE /D_UNICODE /I include src\*.cpp app.res /Fe:sony-head-tracker.exe

The code is split into a hardware-independent core under include/sony_head_tracker/ + src/ (quaternion maths, HID descriptor decoding, the orientation filter, and protocol serialisation — all Windows-free) and a platform layer (HID and Sensor API backends, Bluetooth repair, UDP output, and the GUI). Every backend produces a normalized MotionSample, so recenter, smoothing, axis mapping, Euler conversion, and serialisation are all unit-testable without a headset — see tests/ and run them with build-tests.cmd. A small resource bundle (app.rc: icon, version info, and the Common Controls manifest) is embedded at build time; the icon is generated by tools/make-icon.ps1 and committed as app.ico. All required import libraries are pulled in via #pragma comment(lib, ...), so the executable stays dependency-free with no extra linker arguments. The build is warning-clean at /W4. Every push is built and unit-tested in CI on windows-latest, and pushing a v* tag publishes the exe as a GitHub Release. See .github/workflows/build.yml.

Pair the headphones

1. Update the headset with Sony's app and enable its spatial-audio or head-tracking feature if available, then put the headset in pairing mode.
2. In Windows 11: Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Add device > Bluetooth, and pair your Sony headset.
3. Run sony-head-tracker.exe probe. A usable collection shows usage 0x0020:0x00E1 and a feature description beginning with #AndroidHeadTracker#.

Usage

```text sony-head-tracker.exe (no args -> diagnostics GUI) sony-head-tracker.exe probe [--include-disabled] sony-head-tracker.exe dump [--seconds N] sony-head-tracker.exe repair sony-head-tracker