Score
0
TELEMETRY
LINK —
SAMPLE —
ACCEL —
LENS 50MM
SEED —
Wheels required
Wheel Time needs a physical set of hand wheels and a desktop browser. It reads wheels through pointer capture or the Gamepad API, neither of which exists on a phone or tablet. Open wheeltime.app on a computer with your wheels connected.
Chrome or Edge are the safe targets. Pointer capture without OS mouse acceleration — which the smoothness measurement depends on — is Chromium-only today.
Pan
0 °/s
Click to start
Your wheels are captured when you click. Arrow keys work for trying it without hardware.
1–8 switch drills · R restart ·
F full screen · Esc release
Round complete
—
Paused
The round stopped when this tab lost focus, so your wheel time and
smoothness stay honest. Click anywhere to pick it back up.
Tilt
0 °/s
Round readouts
Smoothness
—
Tracked
—
Time left
60
Rally
0
Current drill
Choose a drill
Your progress
Leaderboard
What Wheel Time is
Wheel Time is a free training range for camera hand wheels, running entirely in the browser. Connect a set of wheels, run short arcade drills, and get graded on smoothness rather than on reflexes or score.
Hand wheels are the two geared wheels an operator turns to pan and tilt a geared head — an ARRI or Mitchell head — or a remote head. One wheel drives pan, the other tilt, and the skill is controlling both at once without the frame ever showing that you are working. That is a motor skill, and motor skills need repetition. Wheels time on a real head is expensive and rare; this is somewhere to put the hours in.
Who it is for. Camera operators keeping their hands in between jobs, camera assistants learning wheels for the first time, and film students who will not get a geared head to themselves for months.
How the grade works
Every drill can be won on score with violent snap moves. Score is bait. The number that matters is smoothness, measured with log dimensionless jerk — the standard smoothness measure from the motor-control literature. Because it divides by movement duration and peak speed, one grade means the same thing on a slow drill as a fast one.
A round also reports how much of it could be tracked. Smoothness only registers while the wheels are genuinely turning, so a round spent making tiny corrections comes back mostly untracked rather than pretending to a grade it cannot support.
The eight drills
| Drill | What it trains |
|---|---|
| Pan Drill | Constant rate on a single axis and clean reversals. Tilt is deliberately dead, so there is nowhere to hide. |
| Intercept | Two-axis diagonal coordination, then a dead stop held for half a second. The stop is the shot. |
| Lock-On | Sustained follow on an unpredictable subject — walking, running or vehicle — and recovering without overshooting. |
| Line Job | Straight lines at constant rate and square corners. A wandering line is a wandering pan. |
| Dead Weight | Momentum. Input becomes acceleration rather than position, which is the closest thing here to the weight of a real head. |
| Crawl | Fast reframes under pressure, with fine tilt trim while the pan is still moving. |
| Long Take | Committing to a move before starting it, and separating steering from rate. |
| Set Down | Very low rates held steady, and small corrections that do not turn into oscillation. |
Which hand wheels work
Wheel Time reads any wheels that present to the computer as a standard USB mouse or gamepad. Nothing is installed and no driver is needed.
| Wheels | Connection | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Rexy 2.0 / 3.0 / 4.0 | USB HID, mouse or joystick mode | Working |
| Hammerhead | USB HID, mouse mode | Should work, untested |
| Kino | USB HID, mouse mode | Should work, untested |
| Blacktek | USB HID, mouse mode | Should work, untested |
| Nodo Inertia Wheels | USB serial via receiver | Planned |
| DJI Master Wheels, ARRI, Freefly, SmallRig, 1A Alpha | Closed wireless protocols | Cannot be read by a browser |
Common questions
- Do I need hand wheels to try it?
- You can run the drills with the arrow keys to see how they work, but the smoothness grade only means something with real wheels turning.
- Does it work on a phone or tablet?
- No. Wheel Time needs pointer capture or a gamepad, and neither exists on a touch device. Open it on a desktop or laptop with your wheels connected.
- Which browser should I use?
- Chrome or Edge. They support pointer capture without operating-system mouse acceleration, which the smoothness measurement depends on. Safari and Firefox will run the drills, but their grades are less reliable and the app says so.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and an account is optional. Your training is saved in your browser either way. Signing in adds leaderboards and lets your wheel time follow you between machines.
- Why smoothness rather than score?
- Because a jerky operator can win an arcade game and still be unhirable. Smoothness measures how steadily you change speed, which is the thing an audience notices and a director does not have to mention.