Beyond Mice and Keyboards

The role of the input device interface of Java 3D is to allow you to add any device into your application and have the runtime environment deal with it just as it would deal with a mouse. However, input devices are not just limited to local PC based equipement. On the exotic end of the spectrum you might include head trackers, motion capture suits and space balls. At the other extreme you might use a file to play back pre-recorded data, for example a previous run of the flight simulator or even motion capture data from the suit.

When you use the mouse and keyboard, you are not using the input device mechanisms. These are just using the standard AWT event streams available to the window to drive the behaviours, and hence your movement (or otherwise) around the virtual world. Input devices construct a completely different view of the world interaction.

An input device is classed as any source of information that may provide 6 Degrees Of Freedom (6DOF) movement feedback. These devices may include arbitrary numbers of buttons (consider the number on any modern joystick). If you can provide direction, rotation and yaw information, then you could construct an input device. Theoretically, you could create an interpolator or network connection as an input device. Consequently, even though a motion capture suit does not fit the traditional 6DOF device, you could make it look like a number of them providing a lot of different information.

Getting information into Java 3D requires the combination of an interface and a class: InputDevice and Sensor respectively. The InputDevice represents the entire object interface while the Sensor represents one element of input from that device. There may be more than one sensor per input device, but only one input device per sensor.