Zooming around: It’s natural

You are in a room. You see the walls and the floor. There is some kind of bar at the bottom. That’s the “Heads Up Display” or HUD. You’ll see later that that’s how be do cut&paste and get feedback. But the big question is “what now?”

Its just what you’d expect. Press down on the left-mouse key anywhere in the room except on the HUD (or an object) and drag. The room moves. Probably too fast – we don’t want to make you feel queasy!. So try again. This time, hold down the shift key before you do your left-mouse click and drag. This time things will move more slowly. Bet you that a week later you’ll be be used to this and stop using that shift key… The left and right keys also rotate your view. Sometimes you might find them more convenient that a mouse drag.

So a drag changes your orientation. But you still need to move. There’s two ways, use the up and down arrow keys to move forward and backward, or use the trackwheel on your mouse if you’re lucky enough to have one.

With those two techniques you should be able to move anywhere in the room. You’ll stop when you hit a wall or the floor, but you can move through objects on the floor.

Something magical will happen if you bang into a door… you might go through it into another room.  In this current release, the door acts like the back button of a browser, so if you’ve moved to a new room already, the door will take you back.  But don’t get too used to door behavior. It will change as we (that’s the royal ‘we’ and includes all the feedback we get from you, the user) figure out new interactions that take advantage of the enormous possibilities of this environment.