These have been made on and off since 1995 at the latest. They never work out even though you'd think they'd be super popular for 3d modelers at least. I first encountered one for SGI workstations.
A lot of people who haven't seen one are confuse it with a trackball, but SpaceMouse and its kin aren't trackballs, they're double cascaded joysticks on a fixed mount shaped like a ball.
The stump om the base works as a 2 axis tilting joystick, and the stem of the ball works like its own 2 axis XY sliding pad with extra push/pull plus twist axes. There's a wire through the stem of the knob to get the readings. Together they capture the whole 6 axis deflections for the knob.
Trackballs OTOH is just rubbing a mousepad rolled up to be a ball to operate a Magic Mouse while charging.
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These have been made on and off since 1995 at the latest. They never work out even though you'd think they'd be super popular for 3d modelers at least. I first encountered one for SGI workstations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360 as one example.
A lot of people who haven't seen one are confuse it with a trackball, but SpaceMouse and its kin aren't trackballs, they're double cascaded joysticks on a fixed mount shaped like a ball.
The stump om the base works as a 2 axis tilting joystick, and the stem of the ball works like its own 2 axis XY sliding pad with extra push/pull plus twist axes. There's a wire through the stem of the knob to get the readings. Together they capture the whole 6 axis deflections for the knob.
Trackballs OTOH is just rubbing a mousepad rolled up to be a ball to operate a Magic Mouse while charging.
I love the SpaceOrb 360 and still have mine but there are no drivers for it anymore.