Integrating the 3dRudder with AutoCAD

I mentioned this device, late last year, and have been meaning to spend time integrating it into AutoCAD ever since. The 3dRudder is an interesting perpheral: while currently targeted at helping seated VR users navigate intuitively in 3D – effectively keeping their hands free – it was originally intended for CAD users. So it’s nice that it’s going back to its roots, as it were. Here’s an excerpt of a video of Christian Slater demoing the 3dRudder integration with Rhino (I’m kidding about it being Christian Slater – he just looks a bit like him :-).

Over the last few days, I’ve finally managed to find time to create a skeleton .NET application that integrates the 3dRudder into AutoCAD. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to spend the time to make use of the navigation APIs to pan/zoom/orbit around AutoCAD’s 2D or 3D environments, but that shouldn’t be a huge task for anyone wanting to take this code further.

Here’s the C# code that makes use of the 3dRudder .NET…

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