Newport News Shipbuilding solution

Understanding the Challenge

We realized from the start that the problem was with how the mouse input was being received; the software itself is already well configured for mouse input, so the real problem is with the type of mouse we're using.

Reinventing the Wheel

Once we knew what we were looking for, it didn't take long to narrow down our options. We experimented with proprietary solutions involving motion controls and found them finicky and imprecise at best. When we thought about building some kind of accelerometer-based controller so we could still use gestures to navigate, we encountered the same problem as before: gestures and motion controls just aren't practical. Sure, with enough practice, these technologies are usable, but at the scale and precision that a company like Newport News Shipbuilding needs to operate at, it's just not practical to have workers waving their arms around just to rotate a schematic — and that's how things would look when the technology is working well. The reality of experimental input interfaces is that things tend not to work well, and time is wasted as users battle with technology just to get things to work like they used to.

Solution: Trackballs and Styli

At this point, it was clear the solution would have to be as reliable as the more established types of pointing device, robust enough to survive in all sorts of weather conditions, and usable while wearing thick gloves. The two technologies that best answer this call are the trackball and the stylus. The strengths of trackballs are their precision and durability; a large, finger-operated trackball can easily be used to direct the pointer or rotate a 3d model as needed, and the programmable buttons found on most trackballs can be set to perform shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v, so it's easy to edit spreadsheets too. The weakness of trackballs is that they can be quite bulky, and larger ones require two hands to use — for situations where ease of transport and one-handed use are priorities, like when holding a tablet, a stylus grants the same advantages as a trackball without sacrificing portability. The tradeoff is that it's harder to use a stylus without taking off heavy work gloves, but that may be less of an issue depending on the type of stylus. Regardless of whether a stylus is preferable to a trackball, however, both hold a clear advantage over the current paradigm, and both are more consistently functional than their gesture-based competitors.