One of my ex-students (who also happens to be our son Trevor) recently changed jobs. He is now designing large commercial flash-freeze food processing freezers for GEA Aerofreeze. He was provided with a workstation computer, a copy of Autodesk Inventor, and a 3Dconnexion 3D mouse. After a week on the job he was bugging me to see if I had a spare one lying about because he wanted it for his home computer, claiming he couldn’t run Inventor without one.

Coincidentally I had just received an evaluation sample of their latest 3D SpaceMouse Pro so I was able to pass on the older version that I had won at Autodesk University a couple of years ago.

“Mouse” is actually a bit of a misnomer because a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse doesn’t move, and won’t perform many of your normal mouse functions such as menu picks and object selections. Its primary function is to act as a display controller. A 3D mouse is quite heavy so it won’t wander. 

It contains a knob a little smaller than a hockey poking up out of it. The knob is spring-centered and has six degrees of freedom. It behaves much as if you were holding the actual 3d CAD model in your hand. You can move it sideways to pan, fore and aft to zoom, and you can move it up and down to change the model’s viewing elevation. You can also twist and rotate the knob about all three axes in order to rotate the model accordingly. 

The correct way to use a 3D mouse is to use a normal mouse in one hand for menu and point picks and object selections while simultaneously using the 3D mouse with the other hand to adjust viewing orientation. The beauty of a 3D mouse is that it doesn’t use the application’s normal viewing commands. For example, you may have created a sketch profile on one face of a model. Now you want to cut-extrude it until it meets another existing face that is on the back of the object and hence is hidden from view. With a 3D mouse you can use your regular mouse to select the profile, then use the 3D mouse to orbit around back, and then finally use your regular mouse to select the termination face.

3Dconnexion’s latest SpaceMouse Pro has a number of useful functions in addition to the positioning puck. Specifically, the number is 15. There are 15 function keys arranged around the puck. The main 11 are pre-programmed to provide functions such as Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Esc along with predefined top, front, side, and “zoom all” views.

The remaining four Intelligent Function keys are smart enough to recognize your application and context-sensitive configure themselves accordingly. For example, when using Inventor in Sketch mode they provide an on-screen virtual NumPad, the Trim tool, the Dimension tool, and the Line tool. When you are in Part mode they become NumPad, Extrude, Fillet, and Hole and in Assembly mode they are NumPad, Create Component, Edit, and Constraint. The really good news is that all 15 keys can be custom-programmed to suit your preferences.

If you haven’t used a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Pro then you definitely need to try one, but I warn you, if you do then you’ll be hooked.