react-360-controls - Implementations of various camera controls for React 360

React 360 relies on this package to update the camera parameters used to render the 3D scene without a VR headset. It provides a few implementations of camera controls out of the box that allow basic movement on mobile, touchscreen, and desktop environments.

Camera controls are queried once per frame, and are given the opportunity to update the camera's current position (as a <X, Y, Z> vector) and orientation (as a rotation Quaternion). For example, the mouse pan controls only update the camera's orientation when the user has clicked and dragged the mouse. If the mouse is not pressed, it leaves the orientation unaffected. This system makes it easy to implement both absolute controls (update position and orientation in absolute physical space), and relative controls (update position and orientation relative to their last values).

Controls are implemented as an ordered queue. Each frame, the React 360 system iterates through this queue until it encounters a control that updates the camera. Once this happens, any other controls are disregarded. This allows the developer to cascade through multiple possible update systems and respond to the one the user is currently interacting with. This is how we are able to use device orientation on hardware that supports it, and mouse dragging on devices with external cursors.

The controls package also handles the input cursor, since this is often closely related to camera orientation. It includes raycasting implementations for mouse and touchscreen input.