Meet the Metaphors

World in the Hand

In last exercise, you have been, asked to move the viewpoint around the centre of your Local node, looking always towards the centre of the basis, and more precisely towards a house placed in that centre.

This way to move around the Viewpoint is usually known as the "world in the hand" Metaphor.

Metaphor

A Metaphor is a way to explain to users of a program how to use its interface. You say "do it like if you where doing something else that you already know". The most well-known one is of course the "Desktop" 2D Metaphor invented by Xerox, developed and popularised by Apple and copied by microsoft.
It says that to access the information available in a computer, you should have the same behaviour as in front of a real desktop. You could open a "folder" from which you get a "file" that you could "open", "write" into and "close"...

As 3D world is more difficult to work with than 2D one, there are lots of metaphor around to represent the way to deal with that world.

The Flying metaphor

Flying Plane

Flying Saucer

Flying Superman

On the Ground metaphor

The Walking metaphor

The driving metaphor

The be yourself and move around metaphor

... the virtual reality metaphor

What about interaction ?

Mouse Picking

A ray between the mouse and your eye

The magic wand

This is just selection... what about manipulation...

Rotation

the object in a cylinder

the object in a sphere

Translation

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