I’d like to share the outcome of a project that I recently did for the Exhibits Team of the Seattle Museum of Flight. They kindly agreed to let me share it with the extended IntuiFace community, so others can benefit too.
The question
Is it possible to display captions / images / hotspots in relation to specific X,Y,Z coordinates of a 3D model?
The solution
Yes, it’s possible with some Excel math and some scripting. In fact, feel free to download this prototype and try it yourself:
Dropbox - MoF 3D objects and Hotspots.zip - Simplify your life (10MB)
This demo showcases a few useful interactions with 3D objects:
- The capturing of X,Y,Z values when you rotate an object
- How to make 3D objects rotate in a loop
- How to display information (e.g. a text caption or an image) when an object gets positioned within a (user definable) tolerance from a specific X,Y,Z coordinate.
This last point was the most complicated one to resolve. If you enjoy some math, you can dig into the XLS that supports this feature and reverse engineer the formulas. I only added one callout to this demo as an example, but the framework supports multiple. I haven’t explored putting callouts right on top of the 3D model, as it’ll interfere with the ability to rotate the object, but it can be done within reason.
Please let me know what you think. Due to limited time, I’m sharing this work as an unsupported prototype.