Ogre's Ninja meets the Space Pilot

[Kojack]

At 5am this morning I got a sudden urge to see how hard it would be to get Ogre displaying on the colour lcd screen on my 3D Connexion Space Pilot Pro.
Turns out it worked better than expected.



That's a real time view of a camera in ogre.

The Space Pilot Pro uses the Logitech lcd manager software and sdk, which is the same one used for the Logitech keyboards and stuff with lcd panels, except it's 320x240 and colour (it takes 32 bit, but I think it's really 15 bit or something).

I'm thinking this could be a handy debug device, while a main ogre app is running I can control a separate debug camera using the Space Pilot.

Ok, the screen is a bit too small to really be useful as a 3d view, but I was bored and other people are running ogre on small devices.

Now if I could find some cheap Saitek Instrument Panels I could try getting them working, although $185aus for a 3.5inch colour lcd is a bit much. (Although maybe a saitek employee is reading this and would like to give me a few for free? Please?)

[jacmoe]

You're such a geek!

[spacegaier]

Nice one ! If that was only my ouzput at these times when I am bored . But at least I finally manged to set up my very first own SVN server, but that is way less awesome than your stuff...

[xavier]

I may be missing something? Is that another platform you had to build Ogre for, or is that screen-scraping another device or snooping a DVI signal, or...?

[Kojack]

The space pilot pro is a 6 degree of freedom usb controller for 3d software. It's lcd screen is exposed via an sdk which gives you access to some of the buttons and the ability to send 320x240x32bit bitmaps to it. I set up an ogre render texture, attached a camera to it, then send the texture's data to the lcd manager.
I wasn't sure how fast it would be able to update (the same software is used for the G15 keyboard which really hates changing images) or how easy to use it would be. Turns out very easy and pretty fast.

Not quite as cool as snooping dvi signals.

[xavier]

Ah neat -- I can see I am well behind the curve with controller innovation (the newest thing I have is an MS Sidewinder FF2...yes, ~10 yrs old now )

[Kojack]

I was able to get around 60% discount on the space pilot pro because I'm a teacher.
It's damn cool, that big knob thing can detect movement on the x, y, z axes as well as pitch, yaw and roll. It only moves a tiny bit (like 5mm), but it can detect force with around 10 bit accuracy per axis. With my earlier version (no lcd screen, much smaller) I set it up to apply linear and angular forces in physx and ogre, moving objects was incredibly intuitive and accurate.

I just wish the Blender team would hurry up and restore support! It was great in Blender 2.49, but the 2.5 series hasn't added it back in yet.

[reptor]

That's great. I was looking at these devices just yesterday and thought if I buy one I don't need that LCD screen

Well, one reason could be that it's about 500 euros here (at http://www.verkkokauppa.com if you want to take a look search for 3dconnexion on that website). I can get a pretty good computer main unit with that price. But this device is meant for 3D professionals so I guess they can ask that much for it and the companies will pay for it. I would buy it only for personal use so it's a bit hard to justify the 500 euros for it. But if I would run a business with a need for 3D work, I would buy every designer one of those.

I fell in love with such a device (an older model, non-USB) at work as a mechanical designer. It reduced the pain in the 2D mouse hand wrist dramatically and really made it a lot easier to handle 3D models and 3D model assemblies. Now if I do that kind of job again, I will demand to have one of these devices.

It's not exactly a new innovation - they have been used a long time in mechanical engineering organisations.

In fact this is good also for handling of 2D screens. I mean zooming and panning. As a mechanical designer I would create technical drawings which are obviously very 2D. Being able to zoom and pan with this kind of a device helped a lot. Otherwise it was an awkward and painful series of movements and clicks with the mouse. So consider it for 2D use as well for zooming and panning. For example image editing programs can greatly benefit from this.



This kind of device can be very good also in game mission editors or game world editors. Those are often a bit awkward to use to place objects and other stuff on the map. I hope commercial game developers could take notice of this... if they intend their game to be 'moddable' (releasing modding tools like 3D model editor or world editor), or if it contains a mission editor, please implement support for these devices. The SDK is free.


And yeah I have written this type of posts before at this same forum. I guess I will never stop doing it. It appears that there is relatively little knowledge of this technology outside of mechanical engineering circles which is a bit wrong because these devices can be very helpful in other areas as well.

[Kojack]

I would love connexion support in the oblivion editor. It has the worst camera controls I've ever used.

One thing I did which was really cool was turning on the one way physics response in physx. I had it so the currently selected object was affected by everything else, but everything else wasn't affected by the selected object. This meant I could grab an object and quickly slam it into a stack of other objects to line it up or stack it, without the stack getting bumped.

The device I also wanted was the Logitech Nulooq. It's like a space navigator (not surprising, logitech own 3d connexion), it has a puck kind of control which does x, y and yaw (it's a 2d+rotation device made for photoshop and stuff), plus the top is like the sensor wheel on an ipod, you can use it as a volume wheel or for adjusting brush sizes in photoshop, etc. It also works great as a jog/shuttle controller for video editing.
But logitech refused to support it, wouldn't update it for newer software (like photoshop cs4), the pc version was missing advertised features which were on the mac version, and then they dropped support altogether. I don't think it works in win7 64 bit either.

Well, one reason could be that it's about 500 euros here

It's about $780-$1000au here, which sucks because in america it's $400 and the australian dollar is currently beating the american dollar. I found an australian educational store which sells it for $291 to verified teachers.


The original Series 1000 Space Ball:

[reptor]

That's an okay-ish price for the Space Pilot you got. That's about 220 euros with the current rates. The price without the discount seems to be higher than what it's here which is a surprise to me.

The cheapest model seems to be about 130 euros here. That's a price I can just about accept paying for something like this for personal use.

I tend to also think about the price converted to our old currency, 'markka', or FIM (5.94573 * euro), and even 130 euros seems too much when I do that. But I guess the salaries have gone up enough to account for that right? RIGHT? I feel I am being cheated with the prices - inflation is a funny thing.




Something that could be done to improve the awareness of and support for these devices would be to tell the various "game engine" projects (commercial or non-commercial) about them and ask them (or even help them) to implement support for these devices. Unity and others like that... if those kinds of projects have the support implemented then the awareness among game developers could rapidly increase as long as the projects advertise it properly. Game developer artists could really appreciate it!

[Kojack]

The cheapest model seems to be about 130 euros here. That's a price I can just about accept paying for something like this for personal use.

I can get the cheapest one (space navigator) for 137 euros normally, or 83 euro as a teacher.

I've already got the navigator, I liked it so much that I got the pilot pro a few weeks ago mainly for the hand rest base (the navigator tends to move around too much, it's not heavy or grippy enough for my desk) and extra buttons.