NavFly Plugin, Version 1.0
Notes on the Flying Camera Navigator (navfly) plugin.
Contributed by Professor Paul R. McCreary of The Evergreen State
College, Olympia and Tacoma, Washington, May 5, 2006.
The control keys and buttons are as follows.
Pausing: The p-key causes all motion of the molecule to stop (pause).
This allows one to freeze the action, for example, to take a snapshot
of a particular region on the model.
Flying: The f-key toggles between the modes of the molecule rotating
about it's center and the user flying about the molecule as in an aeroplane.
These motions are determined by the position of the mouse cursor. The
nearer the cursor is to the center of the screen, the slower the motion.
Thrust: All mouse buttons control the forward and backward flying
motions. If your mouse has more than one button, then the default is
that the left-most button flies forward and all others fly backwards.
You can reverse this orientation by pressing the d-key. If you have
only one mouse button, then the d-key is essential for reversing the
flying motion.
Speeds: The speed of forward and rotational motions can be changed
by typing in different values in the "speed" and "rotation"
variable fields. They can also be increased incrementally by pressing
the s-key and, respectively, the r-key and decreased by pressing and
holding down the shift button along with the respective key.
The navigation flier controls are modeled following those in the
illiview visualization shell, which was developed by the illiview team
led by Professor George Francis of the Department of Mathematics and
the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This navigation system is equivalent to the canonical Bishop framing,
also known as the "natural" framing, distinguished from the
only other canonical framing, that is, the Frenet-Serret. A further
discussion of these two canonical framings of 3D motion can be found
at the following web address.
http://new.math.uiuc.edu/
The navigation system is also implemented in software for viewing
abstract Riemann surfaces and for viewing various large molecules. Examples
of this software can be found at the following web addresses.
http://new.math.uiuc.edu/
http://new.math.uiuc.edu/
These applications operate on windows/PC machines only.
