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Touch Screen Movement

#1

Hi All,

We would like to setup a model on a very large touch screen display at exhibits. As shapespark isn’t very user friendly for navigation when in this touch screen format I would like to know if it’s possible to set external controls on a website for controlling the users movement around the environment.

For example to currently move around in a small location the user needs to actually look at the ground and then click where they want to move, if they do it any other way they could find themselves on the other side of the room instead of taking the 2 steps they wanted.

To combat this I’m interested in trying to create either of these options.

Option 1:

A set of arrows are displayed as an overlay that allows the user to press an arrow for movement forward, backwards and sideways. This would be a window that can be re positioned on the screen by the user to ensure it’s never blocking visibility. It would also be semi transparent.

Option 2:

The tour is embedded into our website and a standard version of the tour is displayed where the user can view and interact with all standard aspects of the tour. A second version of the tour is displayed underneath which is locked in Top View mode. When the user touches a spot in the Top View mode version the the user is moved to that location in the standard version of the tour above.

Does Shapespark offer the ability for either of these 2 options to be created? Does it already offer a simple solution that I’ve overlooked?

#2

When you click a point far away and the camera moves in this direction, it is possible to stop this movement at any time by looking around. In your tests do you find users have problems stopping the movement in such way?

Views menu is currently the main way to help with the navigation. You can also place the anchors spheres or flat text that, when clicked, teleports the user to one of the views, like in a ‘Floor plan’ view here: https://demo.shapespark.com/flat-for-a-couple/#

One approach that we know is used for exhibits is to run Automatic tour on large displays without any interactions, and use smaller tablets for interactions.

Doing Option 2 across two different versions of the scene running on the same computer and browser would involve communicating between these two scenes via JavaScript post message API, so it is a bigger effort that would require JavaScript programming.

Doing Option 2 across two different computers would involve sending messages via some server, so this would require JavaScript programming and server programming.

#3

Hi Jan,

To be honest mate I didn’t even know the the viewer could stop the movement by looking around. It didn’t feel natural to look while moving lol. Perhaps some education for our prospective clients could be the key. The above options I mentioned might still be great for a future release. :wink:

#4

So what is the final result here. Can you use Shapespark on a large touchscreen monitor?

#5

@ntxdave, yes, you can - it works like if it was a very large tablet. However, as suggested in this topic the navigation could be made more user friendly for this touch screen format.