New version of Ab3d.PowerToys brings improved support for touch and better user experience when rotating the camera

Touch and multi-touch support is becoming more and more important. The previous version of Ab3d.PowerToys had only basic touch support – it supported only those touch events that were transformed into mouse events. To get better touch support users needed to use MultiTouchMouseCameraController class that was available in a separate project.

The new version adds excellent touch and multi-touch support to the core of the Ab3d.PowerToys library. This means that without any change in your code, the users of your application that will have touch screen will be able to rotate and move the camera with touch and also use pinch to zoom in and out. New MouseCameraController has many new properties that can be used to configure the touch actions.  To get full control of touch events, you can override some methods that control the behavior of MouseCameraController. See help file for more information.

To further improve the user experience, the new version now also adds camera rotation velocity inertia. This means that if user rotates the camera and then released the mouse button (or touch), the velocity of the camera rotation is preserved and the camera’s rotation is stopped slowly. This looks much more naturally, especially when used with touch.

The new rotation easing is now also supported by StartRotation and StopRotation methods. Now it is possible to start and stop rotation with slowly accelerating / decelerating the rotation velocity.

The last new feature is related to HeightMapVisual3D. Now when the data that is set to HeightData is changed, it is possible to call the new UpdateContent method to update the 3D model of the height map.

I hope you and your customers will like the new features. If you have any additional requests or ideas, please do not hesitate to contact us.