Octo Radial Menus

OctoRadialMenus are a specific class of PieMenus

Characteristics of a fully implemented OctoRadialMenu?:

• PieMenu with 1,2,4, or 8 possibly recursive options
• Mouse navigation of menus & submenus
• Keyboard navigation via keypad
• Implicit GestureRecognition via nested submenus

-- LayneThomas

The beauty of OctoRadialMenus is that they allow physical memorization by mouse gesture movements, and are perfectly matched with memorizable keypad sequences. i.e. up,right,down is equivalent to 8-6-2

I've actually seen these somewhere... it was beautiful, to a programmer. I'm not sure how average users would like it though.

I love using it (Optimoz) for FireFox. NeverwinterNights? used the keypad version to good effect.

---

Okay, so I've been extending this concept in my software for a keypad-only scenegraph manipulator.

Basically the center keys (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) all map to octoradial menus and submenus(shape, material, etc) The Ins, Del, Return keys are mapped to Translate, Scale, Rotate respectively (so Ins+8 moves the object +y) The -,+ keys are mapped to translate on the Z coordinate for convenience. The /,* keys are mapped to scale larger and smaller

So for instance to move an object up and to the right, then change it's shape to the next possibility, it'd be (Ins+8,Ins+6,7,6) - where 7 is the shape menu, and 6 is "next" (or in gesture notation, up to the left, then directly right). Incidentally to change it's specular red to half is 972(material->specular->red 0.5)

This allows for full 3d transforms as well as the program's command set - all within a standard 101 keyboard's numerical keypad. In the softare, I draw the octoradial icons for each command or submenu, although in live performance it would not be displayed, but mapped to through mental/muscle memory.

-- LayneThomas