Logitech is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of mice, and it recently bought up a company called 3D Connexion, which makes a kind of 3D mouse called the Space Navigator.

The Space Navigator is primarily designed for use with 3D modelling programs such as Maya, or the free Sketchup program that you can download from Google. However, it can also be used with more recreational programs such as the aerial maps on Google Earth.

Unlike a conventional mouse, which is essentially limited to two-dimensional movement, Space Navigator allows you to navigate through 3D space on your computer screen.

However, rather than replacing your ordinary mouse, the Space Navigator is actually meant to be used in conjunction with a mouse. So, if you’re a Maya designer, you’ll use the Space Navigator with one hand to control your movement within the 3D workspace, while also using the buttons on your ordinary mouse to select menu commands and manipulate the 3D objects that you’re working on.

In some ways, though, the Space Navigator is actually more like a joystick than a mouse. It looks fairly straightforward – essentially a big stick with a metal base to hold it steady. However, the stick part works very much like a joystick – albeit with a little more precision and control.

Press straight down on the stick when you’re using Google Earth and you’ll plunge straight down to the ground below. Pull upwards and you’ll rise straight up again. An ordinary joystick only allows you to tilt forwards and backwards, or side-to-side, but the Space Navigator is more versatile than that. As well as tilting, you can also skim forwards and backwards, or pan (strafe) from side to side just by nudging the stick in the appropriate direction.

There are two buttons on the base of the unit. The right-hand button simply opens the Control Panel for the 3D Connexion software; this allows you to adjust the way the Space Navigator works, adjusting settings such as the device’s sensitivity, and direction for pan and zoom controls.

By default, the left button simply resets your view to whatever corresponds to north within the program that you’re currently using. However, it can also be set to perform other tasks, such as saving the current document or pressing the Alt or Space keys.

The Space Navigator works well, and we soon found ourselves skimming merrily around the world in Google Earth. The only real problem with it is the virtually non-existent documentation. The printed manual does little more than tell you to plug the device into a USB port, while the online Help files aren’t much better - we wasted about 20 minutes trying to get it to work until we realised that we were actually using it back to front.

The manual doesn’t mention details such as this, nor does it explain that some programs require you to specifically activate the Space Navigator by selecting the Start Driver option from the 3D Connexion entry in the main Windows Start Menu.

We also couldn’t get the Space Navigator to work with Sketchup until we stumbled across that option almost by accident (that’s what happens when you let engineers write your manuals for you).

Still, those niggles aside, the Space Navigator is an ingenious way of providing 3D navigational tools for your flat 2D computer screen. It’s obviously a niche tool for specialised 3D designers, but will earn its keep if you do a lot of work with 3D software.

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