Product definition for lightfield / holographic cursor

[regcs]

The lightfield cursor in Alice/LG prior to version 2.0 is a yellow circle that is overlaid on top of each view and is projected on the 3d surface of the objects in the scene. The user was able to navigate with the mouse in the Looking Glass and click on objects.

In version 2.0 due to the change from a separate Blender window to HoloPlay Service as the renderer for the lightfield on the Looking Glass this mechanism doesn't work anymore. The user can't navigate the mosue in the LG anymore and click on objects, since there is no Blender window in the Looking Glass display anymore. Furthermore, since HoPS will render the quilt, we can't use OpenGL calls to draw the cursor ourselves. This would be now required to be done in HoPS (i.e., calculate the cursor position in Blender, send coordinates of the cursor to HoPS, and request overlay drawing). Note: Although it would technically be possible to draw the cursor in Blender on the views before they are send to HoPS, the latter step might be to slow to get a fluent navigation.

The question is: Do we still try to keep this cursor or do we deprecate this functionality with Alice/LG 2.0?

If yes and the the quilt transfer from Alice/LG to HoPS is not possible in realtime we need to make at least the following changes in HoPS:

• implement a "receive cursor geometry" command
• implement a "overlay" drawing call that calls the received cursor geometry information and draws it on each view

[regcs]

Due to the described difficulties and the lack of usefulness if no mouse interaction is possible in the scene displayed on the LG, this functionality was removed for Alice/LG 2.0 with 296d3b4.