Support for Space Navigator 3D Mouse?

[fagerviken]

@David_Morasz

Do you know if 3DConnexion has a patent maybe on the concept? The market seems suspiciously consisting of a single actor.

The original really relevant patent rights belonged to DLR in Germany, licensed by 3DConnexion and spacecontrol.de (focusing mostly on robotics as far as I know, cf. spacemice.org). These companies split after Logitech bought and merged Labtec and Logicad3D, and discontinued Labtec’s sensor technology. After that there hasn’t been much competition. The original patents have lapsed since long. 3DConnexion has patents on details of how the original concept has developed (introducing LCD screen etc). They also appears to have started a bit with strategic patenting, but the market isn’t big enough for that. My technology is also more than 20 years old. Because the market development has been so slow patents shouldn’t play a big role until it speeds up a bit. The question is if there is room for any competition in the market as it is now. Who would want to invest in all the software support that 3DConnexion has built up over the years? Last time I visited 3DConnexion they gladly told me their turnover as deterrence. We need a bit of disruptive thinking to move forwards.

What 3DConnexion really won’t accept would be if somebody started selling 3D mice mimicking their interface to parasite on their software support. The company Axigalze did such a test connection in their driver and immediately got a letter from LogiCad3D’s legal department. When you downloaded LogiCad3D’s drivers you accepted that you wouldn’t connect any other devices than theirs.

@David_Morasz

Now here’s the thing with that, 3DConnexion actually investing a lot of effort in making their space mice behave the exact same way in all 3D packages. This is really good for the user, but it makes the developer’s life harder, limiting of course how you can use your device.
Basically you give their library a description of your scene and your view and they will give back a new view for you to apply to your viewport next frame, based on the device input of course. They take care of the user interaction based on how the user configured it in their app. This works great for CAD and 3D modeling but works terrible for everything else (like navigating large worlds in Unreal).

Two remarks:

1. It works well as long as you only want to control the viewport with your 3D mouse. As soon as you also want to move objects or edit vertices (which only makes sense in position control which can’t be supported with 3DConnexions devices anyway) things get a bit more complicated.

2. Notwithstanding all their software efforts, 3DConnexion has no support for Linux. By the way, the problem of supporting different operating systems must be problem for you as well. Did you consider using Python instead?

@David_Morasz

I guess you should demonstrate first a working integration in Unreal for that first.

I think one can get a fairly good idea what SpaceCat offers from my video. My question is if I can generate enough customer value for UE to motivate my investment, or should I rather go for a deeper implementation allowing more features with e.g. Blender. Is the UE’s real time lighting combined with SpaceCat’s improved viewport navigation and object manipulation motivation enough to move on (or maybe something else in UE)? E.g. I think SpaceCat’s bi-manual interaction with rotations and translations concurrently for both object and viewport manipulation (i.e. 12DOF) is an improvement to what I’ve seen so far. I hope to find somebody at Quixel or Epic to help me answer that question. Maybe you’d know who that could be?