Making Things See

Making the Point Cloud Interactive

Now that we’re oriented and we’re starting to understand how to move around in 3D, let’s make things interactive. To build a 3D interactive application we need to add two major tools to our growing 3D toolkit. First we need to be able to draw more sophisticated shapes in 3D. In order to give users an interface they’ll actually understand, we need to give them some feedback on the screen about what they’re supposed to do, how they’re supposed to move to interact with our sketch. To do that, we need to draw shapes like cubes and spheres at positions of our own choosing. These will coexist with the points from the point cloud and act as areas of space the users can target to trigger interactions.

Second, we need ...