Zspace Stylus beam

[mihirradia]

Hi,
We have implemented a grabbing function where we pick up the object by pressing the Front button of the zSpace stylus and rotate it in the environment. Please, look at the video for your better understanding " https://youtu.be/gL-jFBKbuIA " . Now if you look at the video properly you can see that the stylus highlights the part to grab.The problem is that the stylus function is not very precise and if a user wants to pick a particular part then it's bit of tedious. Instead of that we want the stylus to project a beam so that the user is well aware of the stylus pointing direction and can grab a particular object. I'm using a vizconnect tool for the grabbing function.

[Jeff]

There is currently not a built-in option for this through the vizconnect interface. However it should be possible to manually modify the config and use the RayGrabber class in grabber.py. I will look into it and try to provide an example.

[mihirradia]

Hi Jeff,
I tried using class RayGrabber from grabber.py but it showed me an error saying that highlight was not defined. When I looked into the class RayGrabber the highlight was not defined and as it is a system file I cannot change it. I believe there is an error in Vizard.

I would be grateful if you could look into it.

Thanks in advance.

[Jeff]

You're right, the highlight object is not defined in the RayGrabber class. I've attached an example that uses a modified version of grabber.py so it works. By default the placement mode is point and place so the object will snap to a surface when released. The placement mode can be set to something else, such as mid-air placement, in the RayGrabber code.