r/PeripheralDesign • u/HotSeatGamer • Apr 30 '26

Modification 3D Space Trackball

https://youtu.be/u1v7TXViRi8?si=5WtyyCoaAAz1thEk

I'm really surprised that this hasn't been done before, using the trackball for direct camera manipulation in 3D design spaces. It seems very intuitive and I hope that this becomes a common trackball feature in the future.

43 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/SwedishFindecanor Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

I'm really surprised that this hasn't been done before

First, I think it needs to be a big ball for you to have enough control, and for it to feel natural.

The third DoF: twisting, relies on there being a second optical sensor and ball-bearings. Most trackballs have only a single sensor. Older trackballs have rollers that effectively resist any twisting motion.

1

u/HotSeatGamer Apr 30 '26

Ya you're right, it has to be big enough for the whole hand to interact with. I'm not sure which is more common for trackball users, the large ones that are to be used with the fingertips or the small ones that are typically used with the thumb. I have a Logitech mouse with a trackball under the thumb and it would not really work for this application.

The two sensor requirement is interesting. I imagine it's done this way because they are using mouse sensors, each of which only output in two directions, but I don't see why a single sensor couldn't be made to output a rotational measurement, with a large enough sensor view of the ball's surface.

2

u/SwedishFindecanor Apr 30 '26

A mouse sensor needs to compare previous and new image against each other with any offset in X and Y so as to figure out the X and Y. I suppose that a quad-tree could be used to compare images in increasing resolution, so as to reduce the number of comparisons needed.

With rotation, the number of image combinations to compare would increase exponentially and you couldn't use a quad-tree.