The problem is that your rotation is relative to the dodecahedron, not the page, and that it uses inverted vertical rotation but not horizontal so it's kind of hard to get used to IMO. I would also switch to movement when a user clicks and drags as opposed to whenever they move the mouse.
Oooh, yeah. This really bothered me too! Its behaviour is really intuitive when you strat with a drag from the middle, but even starting on the edge of the pink cube really makes it freak out.
This essentially forces you to start from the middle, but then you don't seem to be able to do any rotation around the axis pointing out of the screen. To do that rotation your best bet is to click and drag around an inscribed circle - but that in turn means you can't rotate around any other axis in the same movement without running into freak-out behaviour. And anything between those two extremes doesn't really behave intuitively.
Sorry, the controls are insane. I move mouse out to rotate the figure to see the face I want to change color for, then I move mouse in and the dodecahedron rotates again, moving the desired face back. Please, add some arrow controls or something different from mouse movement to rotate.
Otherwise neat and hope you find a good internship.
Awesome! That web viewer kind of sucks but the model is amazing.
Here's where they messed up: the orbit is backwards. Clicking and dragging has very well defined behavior: if you drag to the left, then the thing you are interacting with should move to the left, but in their viewer the camera rotates to the left, so the world rotates to the right, which is backwards!
The "What it does" section, with the buttons "Movement", "Rotation", etc. The behaviour of those buttons is not very intuitive. press and hold is hardly the first action someone thinks of when seeing those buttons. Instead they'll click them. They'll see some weird small movement in the corresponding square, if anything (In the last 2, nothing happens if you just click).
What's more, in the following section "No programming", the example shown says explicitly "click here" and explains that the blue rectangle "will be rotated 35º clockwise when the user clicks the trigger". "clicks" is even bolded. And yet, if you simply click it, it will only rotate a few degrees and return back instantly. Again, you need to press and hold for it to rotate completely.
I'd suggest either changing the wording or adding an explanation to tell the user to press and hold, or changing the behaviour of the examples to actually trigger on click.
Very cool! Is there a reason I can't rotate the pieces? Also being able to click and drag to draw a piece would be better than clicking them one by one.
why does it feel so much worse when you don't drag from the middle and instead from the e.g right side? It feels stuck and sometimes it snaps. If the point from which rotations are calculated changes then I think it should somehow be visually obvious what this means for the rotation and be shown on the screen
Cool demo! One thing you could do to improve this is use quaternions to handle rotation of the cube. There are some great articles on implementing quaternions out there if you search for them. For example, I noticed when you turn a cube "upside down", the dragging to the left or right (with ctrl pressed) rotates the cube the wrong way. Quaternions are a great way to solve this issue
I didn't realize that that was a swiping animation. It might be cool to pair it with rotating the cube in the swipe direction just enough to show that there are sides with extra information as a brief animation, then have it come back into place, or even show a slight rotation towards whichever direction the cursor is closest to as it's moving away from the middle. Or even show it in a quick spin right as the page loads
Yupp, it's on my todo list to give users the option on how difficult they want the rotation to be. So far I have users that want click-to-rotate and even no rotation at all.
It's nice but could you make it so that the rotation direction can additionally be toggled by holding down shift while clicking? I find it very irritating to always move the mouse to the bottom right corner to select the rotation direction - especially since "every click counts".
Other than that, I first thought that some of the tiles should start with correct orientation but soon realized that would make this puzzle just really easy, because our brains are just excellent at seeing the correct image from just a few correctly oriented tiles I think.
Yeah. Click and drag is tricky in 3D, but I should add it to the 2D and list views though. I stopped working on it due to lack of any interest. I use it myself though.
Yeah, this is something I'm considering still. I've heard from a few users that they don't like the pieces being rotated at all, and some would rather have click-to-rotate to make it more difficult.
I might have to make this an option, but waiting to hear from more users on this before deciding.
(OP) You're right - left-mousing outside of the cube and moving the mouse around re-orients the cube. Left-mousing a face and dragging across one of the four boundaries of that face will rotate the face in the direction of the boundary you crossed.
I'm wondering if there would be a clean way to communicate the above to the user other than having them experiment and find it on their own.
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