Welcome back! Last issue is here.
A lot of my frustrations with modern input being how it is stem from living in a post-DS, post-Kinect, post-Gyro world, with none of those properly accepted or interrogated. And while those make for interesting topics on their own, a lot of these also stem from growing up with access to a single Logitech Attack 3 joystick.
I still have that thing. It’s not in good condition and I want to look at tuning it up eventually, but then we gotta fight all this software that doesn’t want to just accept a controller input the right way and mumble mumble mumble anyway!
Let’s talk about Blender.
Where steno and shorthand offer 2 fixes for the majority of general input and typing, Blender represents my own sort of white whale in terms of input and interaction, the menus I want to slay on my way out of WIMP.
To be very clear, I love Blender dearly. I think it suffers a lot from existing within WIMP and having to make itself usable with typewriter keyboards and mice that aren’t really trying to be anything—there’s some interesting options out there to fix some aspects, like the SpaceMouse and the Rotatrix, but my gripes with trackballs by way of dust accruement aside for now, there’s something greater that’s the problem.
The Computer Desktop is 2-dimensional. Blender, is 3-dimensional.
You may notice, that these, are different numbers.
Wild.
I mentioned last time that a big part of the issue with the Computer Mouse is that it flattens interaction down to, at best, 2 dimensions. A trackball mouse can offer some additional—and very welcome—control over manipulation and the viewport, but even then, there’s the disconnect introduced by the fact that A Computer Mouse is something that only provides 2-dimensional data.
A lot of modeling involves a lot more than 2 dimensions.
A lot of doing a lot of things involves a lot more than 2 dimensions.
Jumping back to joysticks for a second, they are also 2-dimensional. But the thing that always fascinated me about the Attack 3 was like…
It has this additional axis on it, right? Never really seen anything like it. It’s a small dial on the user-facing end of the base. Fascinating piece of tech.
Anyway the point is (I’m skipping a bunch of steps here just keep walking with me), that sort of joystick and the modern controller joystick are two entirely different things, and yet people keep designing them like they’re the same thing. And this really comes to a head with Blender, and ship piloting, because input design is still stuck on 2 axes.
There’s no fun or funky thing going on.
There’s hardly anything going on at all.
Blender is like piloting an aircraft (or spacecraft, which is slightly more common to find). You can pretty easily gain axis to 2 analog axes of input, but the third remains out of reach unless you’re lucky. And translating to that additional axis is…weird.
I present as evidence for the court:
- Exhibit A: VR controllers.
- Exhibit B: The Razer Hydra.
- Exhibit C: The Steam Controller?
Gyroscopic/motion tracked input is the thing that I am currently researching, in terms of how to apply it to different programs outside of VR (hence the Hydra).
…I can definitely understand the drive to make VR more immersive, closer and closer to full-dive and FBT, tracking eyes and fingers and brainwaves. But like. The stuff we’ve developed already is also really fucking cool, and it strikes me as odd that there’s no real bleed between input methods. Even for profit margin reasons! What if it was easier to get people into using a hell device like the Quest 2 because the controllers also worked well!
But I guess capitalist competition and closed-sourceness always leads to things that don’t want to work together.
Sucks to suck.
I don’t particularly harbor the thought that gyro/motion input will fix Blender, or solve input methods—different strokes, as they say—I just want to be able to maneuver in a 3D space by providing 3D input. And I think this is a space that is sorely underexplored. Will it show a way beyond WIMP? Maybe. I think it will show one, by necessity, by needing multiple ways to interact. Maybe by the time we get our paws on a Steam Frame and have controllers that have haptics and are actually able to be cracked open, those haptics can also show ways of interacting beyond the bounds of the desktop rectangle.
And it’s the maybes that are the most interesting.
Because, what if it does work? Even if it doesn’t, there’s stuff to learn. But what if it does? What if I’m right? What if it feels right?
That’s really what drives this all, at the end of the day.
Nothing feels right, right now. Maybe it never will, but maybe…
Maybe there’s something out there, after all.
And maybe we can find it, if we just look.