Better mouse controls for Columbus View

[emackey]

Need to re-think the mouse controls in Columbus View so that a user who doesn't know fancy shift-key tricks can still get around and see all sides of the patent-pending Columbus map. There should be a set of controls in CesiumWidget for navigating this view, but ideally just "mousing around" without the keyboard should get you to the coolest and most interesting views.

[mramato]

Obviously, all mouse buttons can be customized and remapped, but how about this strategy for the defaults? It applies to all modes.

Left -> Pans the current ground point being looked at.
Middle button -> Hold down to zoom in out, or just scroll the wheel.
Right -> Rotate around current ground point (not available in 2D).

This is extremely reasonable (and pretty common as far as I can tell). Right now both middle and right map to zoom, which doesn't make much sense.

[emackey]

So, if I'm reading that right, left causes the camera to orbit around the spot on the map being looked at (which I would call "explore" or "orbit" mode, not pan), and Right holds the camera stationary and changes its attitude (Hollywood would call this pan & tilt).

Sounds good. If we switch middle & right it might make life easier for STK & Insight3D users who are accustomed to zooming with the right mouse. The wheel would still zoom when spun, but would pan/tilt when pressed.

[pjcozzi]

None of us are fans of the current use of shift so I'm glad we are revisiting it. Let's try @mramato's suggestion and see how it feels. However, why can't rotate work in 2D? We do that now when holding down the middle mouse button.

[mramato]

@emackey By Pan I mean the camera remains facing the direction it is facing but the ground point and camera location both move. Similar to rotating around the center of the earth, or what happens if you are looking and a tilted view in Google Earth and you move the mouse button.

@pjcozzi You're right, I was only thinking of 3D rotation, but just 2D constrained spinning makes perfect sense.

[emackey]

Had meeting with @mramato and @bagnell. Dan is on the case.

[mramato]

Just to elaborate on @emackey comment,

We decided that the goal is to make the mouse "feel" the same way in 2D/3D/Columbus and allow for the most common mouse controls without having to manually "switch" modes or use keyboard shortcuts.

Here's what we came up with (after comparing against several virtual globes out there)

Left button -> Move where you are looking at on the map/globe Middle button/Wheel -> Zoom in and out of where you are looking at.
Right button -> Rotate around the point on the map you are looking at.

Of course this will be an iterative process, so after trying this out for a couple of weeks, we can revisit the issue and see how we like it.

[bagnell]

The new mouse handling was merged into master with #92.