Palette:geoPanel

This example shows you how to put any 2D panels into a 3D scene with lighting and operate them as you would in 2D.

This is in the Palette under Techniques.

You create a bunch of Panel Components as you would in 2D normally, and instead of displaying them in a 2D Container COMP, they are used in a 3D render by connecting each gadget (a 2D panel, see geoPanel/geopanel1) inside a customized Geometry component with custom parameters. The Render Pick DAT and the Render TOP are set up to operate the panels virtually.

You can use a mouse with this, single-finger multitouch works as well, and multi-finger.

A tag 'geopanel' on the geo_* components causes the Render Pick DAT callback to treat Geometry components to be treated in this way. All other 3D objects are ignored by the callback.

WARNING: It's important that the Display flag is Off for all panels being displayed in 3D. That is, they should not also be displayed as 2D panels in the container of the 3D interaction.

Discussion here: https://www.derivative.ca/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=8027

Flow – How it Works

• You mouse click on the geoPanel container which only uses a 3D rendered image as the background. The click/drag/release events drives a Multi Touch In DAT that is pointing to geoPanel.
• The Multi Touch In DAT is passed to the Render Pick DAT that is also connected to the 3D render. Render Pick gets back an event list in its callback that identifies which 3D objects were hit and where.
• The Render Pick DAT sends interactTouch() events to individual gadgets (panels) in geoPanel to operate them virtually.

Family of 3D Gadgets in geoPanel/geoGadget

In geoPanel/geoGadget there are a bunch of template components. geoGadget/geopanel is the most generic in that you provide it a panel/gadget external to the component - in that example it's button1, but you can switch it to any gadget or any panel you've made.

The rest of the components in geoGadget are slight mods of each otherBold text - they all contain a generic gadget - geoslider contains slider, geobinary contains binary, georadio contains radio, geomenu contains menu, etc. so you don't need to provide your own gadget. Each of these is a master clone with unique parameters. Obviously you can adapt your own, but make sure you change the Clone parameter to a new name.

On the right in geoPanel are the instances that are rendered in the Render TOP.

Note that the customer parameters on the geogadgets like geoslider, geobinary, etc have parameters that are pulled inside, for example a slider gadget using refererence expressions inside the geogadget. These particular geogadgets use gal gadgets which have the added feature of pushing values back up to the custom parameters when you operate the gadgets virtually.

Note: The geoGadgets don't handle entering text yet.

Note: The geoGadgets are designed to over-render their icons - i.e. a 100x50 gadget is rendered internally at 200x100 to give better close-up appearance.

Yanking This Functionality to Other Projects

You can copy/paste these nodes to some other place (.toe) and go from there:

• geoGadget/* (and/or others)
• Render TOP (which you can replace later)
• Render Pick DAT with its callback DAT
• Multi Touch In DAT
• the background, camera and light - which you can delete later

Or to start from scratch within geoPanel, delete the right column of Geogadgets (blue), then copy/paste components from them left and move/customize them.

Remote Operation of geoPanel

See remotePanel. Aside from working directly with a mouse and Windows-supported touch screens (both via Multi Touch In DAT), you can remotely drive the main geoPanel container with panel.interactTouch() and panel.interactMouse().

This is locally set up in geoPanel/virtualPanel and virtualMouse. Here it runs on the same machine in the same process, but you can move it to another process and/or machine and slightly change the code.

As it is now, you can bring up virtualPanel in a floating window (it will be black) and then go into Perform Mode or bring up geoPanel in another floating window. As you move your mouse over the black panel, a circle moves in the geoPanel window and you can see the effect of rolling over the buttons with border highlights. If you click, it will operate the gadgets in geoPanel.

In virtualMouse is the Parameter Execute DAT that either uses interactMouse() or interactTouch() to operate the panel. If you want to move the virtual control to another process, you would leave virtualMouse where it is, and change virtualPanel to receive TUIO, OSC or raw TCP/IP DAT messages that affect the three parameters of virtualMouse: Panel Select, Panel U and Panel V, just like it does now locally.