Virtual Trackballs Revisited

Rotation of three dimensional objects by a two dimensional mouse is a typical task in computer aided design, operation simulations, and desktop virtual reality. The most commonly used rotation technique is a virtual trackball surrounding the object and operated by the mouse pointer. In our article,

K. Henriksen, J. Sporring, and K. Hornbæk: "Virtual Trackballs Revisited", IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2004, 10(2), 206-216,

we review and provide a mathematical foundation for 3 popular virtual trackballs:

Chen, Mountford, and Sellen: "A Study in Interactive 3-D Rotation Using 2-D Control Devices", Computer Graphics, 22(4), 1988
Shoemake: "ARCBALL: A User Interface for Specifying Three-Dimensional Orientation Using a Mouse", Proceedings of Graphics Interface'92, pp. 151-156, 1992
Bell (now Andresen), "Bell's Trackball", unpublished, 1988, Written as part of the "flip" demo to demonstrate the Silicon Graphics (now SGI) hardware.

A self-contained source code implementing the above 3 virtual trackballs together with our own prefered trackball is available as C++ packed using Gzip and Tar: trackball.tgz. It is as part of the OpenTissue toolbox released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Please contact Knud Henriksen at kaiip@diku.dk for further details, comments, or suggestions.