Turn in place with hand tracking?

#1

Hello!

I’m going to feel terribly silly when someone provides me with a very obvious solution, but I can’t seem to figure something out. I am using this software for visualization and presentation of a 3D model of a house and discovered how wonderful the hand tracking options were for teleporting and dynamic components. My issue is that I can’t for the life of me seem to figure out how to turn or pivot in place (the same input as pushing the joystick left or right) without physically turning your body. Occasionally, in a room-scale boundary, you kind of get stuck in a corner and need to physically turn around, but still be facing the same direction in the model to continue moving in the same direction (physically turn 180° right, rotate 180° left in the model). Is there a solution to this that I just have not stumbled upon yet?

I am using a Meta Quest 3, running the model natively after uploading to the cloud from SketchUp, and there will only be one user in the model at a time.

I greatly appreciate any information or solutions that can be provided.

Have a wonderful day!
-David

#2

Hi David!

There is no way to turn in-place with the hands. We’re really limited to what inputs we can recognize with the hands…

As you may or may not know, teleporting straight up brings you back to the warehouse you start, with the small-scale model in front of you. When you start shooting the teleporting beam (either with the controller or with the hand), and then move the beam upwards, at some point the beam is no longer drawn at all. If you then release the button or the hand movement, then you are teleported back to the warehouse.

So here is a possible idea for your use case: when the beam would be pointing up but before releasing the button/hand movement, the model would disappear and the warehouse would be visible, but you could still move the controller/hand back down and it would reappear. The idea is that if you turned or moved physically while the warehouse was temporarily visible, the in-model position would not change. So you could move the beam up, then do a few steps to recenter yourself in the warehouse (which is tied to the physical space), and bring the beam back down to make the model appear again. Your actual model position wouldn’t have changed because of your movement in the warehouse. Does it make sense?

If the model rotation also wouldn’t change, then you could also bring the beam up, turn yourself 180°, then bring it back down, and the model would have physically turned 180° as well.

I’m trying to think about a visual effect, like drawing the model transparently or drawing the edges only, but that might be a bad idea. Anything that makes the whole, large model move with your head is highly nausea-inducing in my experience. Maybe some stylized feedback would be enough, like a circle with an arrow in front of you that remains attached to you when you move and turn?

I can post here a pre-version of the Quest version of the program, if you are interested in participating in the development of that feature!

#3

First off, thanks for your response!

I had an assumption that the issue was tied to limited available inputs with the hand tracking. I actually didn’t know about being able to teleport straight up to return to the warehouse. I was able to do it with the controller but not with the hand tracking. Maybe I need to change the arc distance settings or something like that.

I do like the idea of being able to lock or freeze the model in place so that you can reposition yourself. Perhaps an option to place that on one hand, and then the actual teleport on the other? Unless that causes some user accessibility challenges that aren’t immediately obvious to me?

I am not a programmer and have no idea the complexity of tackling something to this extent, but my initial thought based on what you described would be turning the model semitransparent, and then the user is basically an undocked camera, capable of moving through walls, into another room, or even just turning in place and then upon ending the “ghost state” the camera redocks in that new position with the model not having changed positions at all. I agree with not moving the model as a whole while you are inside of it. That would definitely make me dizzy or nauseous.

Just for some extra context, the idea is to use this in a presentation sense for someone who is not well versed in the hardware that will be able to navigate a simple model of a house after given simple instructions on the controls. That is why the hand tracking is very appealing in this situation.

I appreciate the response, and would probably be interested in being a lab rat to help out with making this program even better.

-David

#4

Hi! Sorry for the delay. I’ll have a more complete answer soon, but first, I just checked and indeed you’re correct: with the hands, there is no special treatment for teleporting straight up. We can add that, but we should also reconsider whether it’s a good approach, given how hard to discover that feature is (for the controllers case)…