A couple of weeks ago Hans Bakker, who had never touched KOffice code before, started hacking on a Krita plugin for the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. Within a week or two he had a working plugin for Krita and it quickly became clear how cool these little devices are and how many possibilities for new user interaction paradigms they afford.
So Hans suggested contacting Ettore Pasquini from 3DConnexion about the possibility of them donating a SpaceNavigator to the KOffice project for testing purposes. Well, that was only last week, and this week a box with three SpaceNavigators already landed on my desk. These are nice, solid feeling, attractive to handle things that come out of the box with drivers for Linux.
For an early review of what is possible with the SpaceNavigor on Linux, see this review on Linux.com, SpaceNavigator: An affordable 3D controller for Linux.
I will be distributing them among KOffice hackers for playing with and testing Hans' code this week, and I am sure that during the development of the KOffice 2 series of releases we will find more and more interesting uses for this unusual and fun interaction tool.
I'm sure the guys working on Marble and KStars would love to borrow one of these :-) Perhaps some of the games too?
Awesome! Thanks a lot to 3DConnexion! Glad to see Krita coming along so nicely!
Haha! I should threaten to work on other projects than Marble more often.
Pardon my feeble imagination, but how usefull can a 3d controller be for a 2d drawing application ?
Re: 3D for Krita ?
The third dimension is used for zooming. While the first and second is used for panning.
And they should get the possibility to advertise that somehow - I'm sure they would appreciate some positive official statement or something.
Thanks again! And welcome to the Dot!