Idea for improving mouse click precision in VCs

[sotrackme]

I recently got a TrackIR for use with MSFS, and I'm enjoying it tremendously, but like others I'm having a little trouble hitting small clickspots in virtual cockpits. However, I think I have an idea about how this could be made easier.

The way it works at the moment is that (as long as the mouse doesn't move) the mouse pointer stays in the same position on the screen when you rotate your head. What this means, of course, is that the mouse pointer changes its position relative to the objects in the simulated world, and this makes it hard to hit clickspots because you have to keep your head very still.

I would suggest that when you rotate your head, the mouse pointer should stay in the same position relative to the virtual world. The consequence of this is that the position of the mouse pointer relative to the screen would change (even if you aren't moving the mouse), but that's basically irrelevant -- the screen is just a window that we're looking through into the virtual world, and what we really want to control is the position of the mouse pointer relative to that virtual world, not relative to the screen.

To put it another way: In the real world, when you point at something with your finger, then rotate your head, the finger doesn't move relative to the object you're pointing at. In the virtual world, the mouse cursor shouldn't do this either.

I realize there are a few technical issues to deal with (see my thoughts about this below this post), but I think none of them should be insurmountable, and I think this type of "mouse pointer steadying" would be a boon for people who are using virtual cockpits.

Martin

Technical Annex

- What happens when you rotate your virtual head so far that the mouse cursor would disappear off the screen? My suggestion would be that the mouse cursor should get "dragged along" so that it's always just on the edge of the screen.

- What happens when the head is translated? To keep the mouse cursor completely steady over the object we're pointing at, we need to know the distance to that object; otherwise, due to parallax, the position of the cursor relative to the object will shift. Finding out the distance to the object is something only the game developer could do, so this would require their cooperation. (It shouldn't be hard, though -- just read out a value from the Z buffer.) However, an "informed guess" for the object distance should be good enough in many situations. In a virtual cockpit, for example, most clickspots are roughly a metre away from the eye, since that's about as far as we can reach using one arm. If we use that as our "best guess", then even if the object is actually a bit closer or further away, we'll still have eliminated most of the position shift, and that should be enough to make hitting the clickspot much, much easier.

- If the head's centre of rotation is different from the position of the virtual "eye" (as I believe is the case with "TrueView" switched on), then rotation will also cause parallax effects, though to a lesser degree than with translation because the changes in eye position are not as great. For the small involuntary head rotations that we want to compensate, the effect is probably negligible.

[VincentG]

Interesting thought, but it would have to be something done by the game developers.

[Catch22]

I must say I like the idea and it's too bad MSFS isn't designed in this way. Perhaps we'll see it in a future patch or MSFS11?

[Razi]

I would suspect that this feature is already quite do-able and is being done in games such as ArmA and the not yet released Insurgency mod for HL2. The way they have programmed the aiming reticle to stay relative to the virtual world regardless of how you move your view could work identically for the virtual cockpits in flight/racing simulators.

Just as Vincent said, this feature is under control of the gaming developers.