Benjamin Watt

The SpaceNavigator – the ‘future’ is here

January 28, 2007 – 5:04 pm | by Benjamin Watt

Okay, so it’s the space year 2007, and frankly – I expected things to be a heck of a lot more futuristic by now. Call me unreasonable if you must, but where are all the flying cars, where are the damn hoverboards that Michael J Fox showed us in Back to the Future, why aren’t at least some of us living on the moon, and WHY do I still have to use a mouse to move around in 3D on my PC?

Right, so I have no intention of addressing those first few, but as you might have guessed by now – the last one I DO want to try and solve, because if not now, when? This is 2007, those aliens have got to be coming soon, and who’s to say they’ll still allow us to play on our computers?

Luckily, 3D Connexion had my back covered, and handily released the SpaceNavigator near the end of 2006. 3D Connexion has been in the market of alternative 3D navigation input devices for sometime, but until now it’s been a prohibitively expensive road to take. The premise of these devices is that in one hand you have your usual mouse choosing options and the like, and then in the other hand on the other side of the keyboard you have your 3D Connexion setup which is really a rubbery cylinder that you can move in six different axis by pulling it or pushing it left, right, away from you, towards you, pulling it up, pushing it down, twisting it in either direction, the lot really. The idea is that this device should be a lot more intuitive when navigating a 3D scene as you’re kind of moving your hand in the direction you want to go, rather than moving the mouse around whilst pushing a given keyboard shortcut key. It’s much better explained by the makers themselves here, if what I’m saying makes no sense.

I first came across these guys back in December 2004 at the ill-fated inaugural CGI Festival, where I got to try out a product they had going at the time, the SpaceBall, similar idea to the latest products, but with a ball instead of a cylinder. It seemed kind of a neat way to navigate, but one that you’d probably need to spend a bit of time on to get used to initially. However, as I alluded to earlier, these things were far too expensive to take a risk on, even if there were potential repetitive strain injury advantages to be had.

Jump forward two years, and although the CGI Festival has disappeared, 3D Connexion had been bought up by Logitech, and the SpaceBall is gone, there’s a number of different devices from them that do much the same thing. The differences between them seem to only lie in the range of buttons around the navigation device itself, and in the case of the SpaceNavigator, you only have two buttons and an overall smaller design, but a very affordable price of around £50 (if you’re not using it commercially) and the same actual navigation cylinder that the other devices have.

How could I resist? Cheap price, funky blue glow, and the word ‘Space’ in the title – the future has arrived! When this little box of future turned up, I installed the drivers along with the plugins that get installed to support any of the applications it can use on your PC. In my case, really Maya was the only app of interest, although it will work in Google Earth too which is quite nice.

The first time you start up Maya after the driver install, the 3DConnexion Control Panel pops up, which it will do for any supported application. It gives you the option to set individual settings for how you want to navigate in that particular application. You can set how sensitive it is, which direction zooms (I chose the non-default green arrowed option shown in the screenshot to the right because it made more sense to my workflow), you can turn off a given axis, or make some more sensitive than others, or you can reverse the axis, which I did to the zoom function as it just proved irritating the other way round. If the blue glow around the base isn’t to your tastes that can be turned off too, although you’d be mad to – it highlights your new toy very nicely to passers by.

You can also configure what the two buttons on either side of the base of the device do, but in the case of Maya, it’s better to do this within the custom panel available within the application for a greater number of options.

The custom panel can be opened and closed within Maya by clicking on the new shortcut button added to the top of the screen, or at its default by clicking on the right hand button of the SpaceNavigator, and it gives you access to some application-specific options with regards to navigating a Maya scene, and configuring the two buttons. These buttons can be set to effectively run any command, be it a ready provided menu option, or a custom MEL script, which is handy.

So, options aside – how does it handle? Well, the danger with this kind of thing is to expect too much of it, which was initially my problem. I almost expected just to rest my hand on it and find that suddenly I could zip about in 3D without barely a thought, and that I’d become SO much more productive. The reality the first time I tried it though was one of wanting to throw the damn thing out of the window. Make no mistake, you need to spend a bit of time just getting used to it, making tweaks to the sensitivity, working out if each axis makes sense as it’s currently setup, and just generally mucking around. I actually found that after 15 minutes of playing, I had to just walk away and forget about it for a bit. On returning to my PC though somehow it all started to click, and I have to say – after a month of use it’s really become a very useful asset.

There’s no doubt I can navigate to a particular point in a scene far more quickly and intuitively than with a mouse. With the SpaceNavigator you can be both rotating, moving and zooming all at the same time, rather than one at a time with a mouse, which really makes the world of difference once you become used to the whole thing.

The SpaceNavigator is relatively heavy, and the combination of a rubber bottom, and rubber grip for your hand means it doesn’t really slip away from you as you use it, which is probably just as well, as this thing isn’t perfect.

The big problem I had was really working out where exactly my hand should be to use it effectively. For general panning around you can just plonk your hand on top of it and push around, but it’s not terribly accurate, and the motion of twisting it, or pulling it up into the air can be awkward. Instead, I’ve found resting my hand beside it and kind of pinching the whole thing with my fingers works best. The pulling up motion still isn’t great, I sometimes find the base not quite heavy enough and have to kind of hold it down with a couple of fingers, but on the whole it works out well enough.

What I can’t get used to though is the two buttons on either side. They just feel awkwardly located, and difficult to push from the angle that my hand is at. I usually find myself having to stop and look at it before realising I’m not pushing the button correctly. I naturally want to push it down towards the desk, but the button needs to be kind of squeezed in towards the centre of the device, which with my left hand is fairly fiddly on the right hand side, and almost totally unusable on the left. I’ll often have to take my hand away from its usual position and go out of my way to push the buttons. This kind of counteracts the overall efficiency of using the SpaceNavigator, so the buttons lie unused most of the time as a result.

And that in a particularly large nutshell, is what the SpaceNavigator is all about. It could do with some greater application support: I could do with being able to use it in MotionBuilder and Houdini, it would even be fun to use it with something like Photosynth come the time. It does however come with an API for writing support into applications, along with some example applications, some of which allude to the device being a lot more intuitive to use than it actually is and aren’t very practical. New versions of the software come out frequently though, so you never know what’s around the corner – the device does already support a large number of applications listed here, and they’ve also just added support for Mac OS X, in addition to Windows.

Autodesk Maya 8.5 just came out a couple of weeks back, so I’m personally hoping they add support for this latest release as soon as possible – I don’t want to go back to the old-fashioned way, and it’s the only thing stopping me using 8.5 in anger (the new Python scripting support is great).

The SpaceNavigator gave me a little glimpse of a better world of 3D navigation, and although not perfect – it will do for now until I can navigate purely through mind power. Something for the space year 2008 maybe?

Update (12/03/2007): Please see the comments for the latest on the SpaceNavigator. Basically, Maya 8.5 support came out shortly after I wrote the above, and having tried it this last weekend it works a treat, even under Vista. 3D Connexion have also just let me know that the costs to buy one of these should normally be around £39 + delivery, and there are more retailers selling it now so shop around.

3D Connexion also tell me that there apparently also used to be support for MotionBuilder in the good old days of Kaydara, so anyone who’s keen on getting support for this product with the SpaceNavigator should go and rattle Autodesk’s cage. Similarly, Houdini support will only come if Side Effects have enough people requesting it.