Rotate the world • Hacker News Board

Re: Rotate the world

#71

Post by wingerlang » Sat, Nov 09, 2013, 9:31 AM UTC

dalyons wrote: post #55

As an experiment I used this D3 geo stuff to visualize my last year or so across the globe: http://dalyons.github.io/where-is-dave/index.html?use_cached... Works much better on chrome than FF unfortunately. I thought it turned out pretty cool, as a practical example of what you can use this stuff for. It was super fun to build, D3 is pretty awesome. You can also load your own photos from FB if you want to see your ow…

Cool. This is pretty much exactly what I've been thinking of doing. The path, pictures and map - more or less spot on.

Re: Rotate the world

#72

Post by Arelius » Sat, Nov 09, 2013, 9:52 AM UTC

jasondavies wrote: post #36

BitMastro wrote: post #6

This is just my personal preference, but I believe the naive implementation is miles ahead of the improved ones. The improved version needs at least two movements to go to the other side of the world, doesn't follow the rotation if the cursor is too fast and worse than all, performs a gamma rotation for each non-equatorial point of the sphere. Since we have two degrees of freedom on the screen, I expect to use them t…

Thanks for the feedback! I agree it’s not the most intuitive approach for all situations, particularly when you’re used to a North-South orientation for maps. The rolling is perhaps made more obvious with my use of a graticule. For this reason, I’d be interested in optionally restricting to two degrees of freedom when dragging on the globe, and the third angle could be modified when dragging outside the globe only. S…

The problem is, trackball-style movement is super useful when you get used to it. But is simply awfully unintuitive, and I'd probably never use it somewhere that not something like a professional tool.

Re: Rotate the world

#73

Post by sambeau » Sat, Nov 09, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

jasondavies wrote: post #36

BitMastro wrote: post #6

This is just my personal preference, but I believe the naive implementation is miles ahead of the improved ones. The improved version needs at least two movements to go to the other side of the world, doesn't follow the rotation if the cursor is too fast and worse than all, performs a gamma rotation for each non-equatorial point of the sphere. Since we have two degrees of freedom on the screen, I expect to use them t…

Thanks for the feedback! I agree it’s not the most intuitive approach for all situations, particularly when you’re used to a North-South orientation for maps. The rolling is perhaps made more obvious with my use of a graticule. For this reason, I’d be interested in optionally restricting to two degrees of freedom when dragging on the globe, and the third angle could be modified when dragging outside the globe only. S…

I'd like to disagree. I prefer the improved version.

One of the great joys of manipulating a globe like this is being able to rotate it into completely novel views: not just upside down but at totally arbitrary angles.

The improved version makes this very simple.

If you only want to view the world in a conventional (or upside down) way then I agree that the naive version is very easy to use,

Re: Rotate the world

#74

Post by GhotiFish » Sat, Nov 09, 2013, 5:10 PM UTC

BitMastro wrote: post #6

This is just my personal preference, but I believe the naive implementation is miles ahead of the improved ones. The improved version needs at least two movements to go to the other side of the world, doesn't follow the rotation if the cursor is too fast and worse than all, performs a gamma rotation for each non-equatorial point of the sphere. Since we have two degrees of freedom on the screen, I expect to use them t…

There are two competing methods of navigation in blender that have to do with this point.

Turntable and Trackball.

fairly intuitive names for the concept, turntable keeps one axis fixed, and lets you rotate on the other two, and trackball behaves, well, like a track ball. Much like this demo.

The turntable is much simpler, but the trackball is much more capable (if a little tricky to use).

If you use it for a bit of time however, you'll find that despite only have two degrees of freedom, you're capable somewhat indirectly controlling the roll of your camera by click and dragging in a circle.

Test it on the globe! Grab a point and move your mouse in a circle, the larger the circle the faster the roll. It's actually pretty intuitive when you get used to it.

Which is why the debate between Turntable and Trackball exists. They both have merit.