AI has been used to find out how to access motion tracking data from AirPods, enabling one Linux user to use head tracking data to produce a software mouse. AirPods and AirPods Pro have head tracking capabilities thanks to some built-in motion-detecting sensors. While it is currently used for things like Spatial Audio and Siri Interactions, one enterprising user has taken steps to widen their use on Linux.
Apple does allow AirPods and other earphones to work on Linux and other platforms by functioning as standard Bluetooth headphones. They can be used for normal listening, but things like head tracking are not available once you leave Apple's ecosystem. In a Reddit post on Friday, Matteo Guaduisi said they wanted to control their mouse using a pair of AirPods 3 on Linux.
However, they said that every open source project in the same field said that AirPods 3 were not supported. Driven by this apparent lack of support, they spent an afternoon using Claude Code to find out how AirPods 3 work when it comes to motion tracking. At one point, AI agents were instructed to check other similar projects in the background for an answer.
This turned out to be a good idea, as one agent uncovered the answer in iOS framework code. It turned out that AirPods 3 uses a different protocol than the Pro models. The data also wasn't being sent over due to the use of a restrictive default setting.
The default Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) was too small for both the standard audio data and motion sensor data, so the latter was excluded. After fixing that, the head tracking data was streaming over Bluetooth at 200Hz. The effort eventually led to the creation of the Mouse Pods project, which reads the motion sensor data of AirPods 3 and AirPods Pro in Linux.
As the name implies, a user's head movements translate into pointer movements on the desktop. Crucially for AirPods users, the project relies on changes on the Linux host end, not anything directly affecting the AirPods firmware. If you do experiment with this, you're not going to be left with non-functional AirPods, or anything that breaks a warranty.
The project has also released the code as "Open" and for others to use in their own projects.
Source: AppleInsider · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing