Mitch Kapor and Handsfree 3D are back with a new demo of their upcoming 3D camera. Last time, developer Philippe Bossut showed the basics of movement. Now he's demonstrating the use of gestures to edit objects in Second Life. To speed up development, the company stuck with the basic on-screen pointer system, mapping the right hand's gestures to mouse moves and the left's to different clicks and commands. For all the world, it looks to me like driving a car with a stick shift, just on the wrong (read: British) side:
That might actually add a level of comfort for some user, but Bossut admits that the system is less than ideal.
"Granted, this is not an interface that'd be practical for object editing: once you have 2 hands in 3D, the next step is to use the whole range of possibilities that a 3D multi points system gives you," he wrote on the Handsfree 3D blog. "For instance, I'd like to "grab" an object on each side and stretch to scale it, or rotate it freely. Also, the left hand click control is pretty cool when using it but the absence of visual feedback on screen is of course something that needs to be fixed. All that however requires to write a brand new interface for object editing and that's another objective worthy of doing if there's a demand for it, but hard to justify without it."
What do you think? Is there a demand yet or is the time for a 3D camera interface still too far out?
It's the SL tai chi! Way cool.
Posted by: HatHead Rickenbacker | April 23, 2008 at 08:42 AM
Not usable yet, but my feeling is that this is the right way.
Posted by: Opensource Obscure | April 23, 2008 at 09:09 AM