LibOrb Home Page

LibOrb is a library for comminicating with a SpaceOrb 360 and Spaceball Avenger Six-Degree-Of-Freedom virtual reality controllers made by Spacetec IMC.

The SpaceOrb allows you to move and rotate in any direction simultaneously. The device connects to your machine via a standard RS-232 serial interface. LibOrb can be used along with OpenGL or other real-time graphics APIs to write virtual reality software, games, or other applications. The orb provides high resolution translational and rotational information, suitable for even the most demanding tasks. The orb has 6 general purpose buttons and 1 hardware reset button, all of which can be read by an application using LibOrb.

The current release version of LibOrb is 0.6. LibOrb has been used successfully on Sun Solaris 2.[56], SGI IRIX 6.2, OpenBSD, Linux, and Windows NT.

LibOrb Binaries:

• LibOrbNT.zip -- LibOrb compiled for Windows NT. The zip file also includes glut32.dll
• LibOrb should compile trivially on Unix boxes, so there's probably no need for Unix binaries.

LibOrb Source Code:

• Current LibOrb Release: Click here to download LibOrb-0.8.tar.gz (Monday, 23-Nov-1998 11:29:49 CST)
  Includes better support for C++, Windows NT serial code, the "orbfly" OpenGL demo, and updated serial code fixed for IRIX 6.4.

Applications which support the SpaceOrb 360 (via LibOrb)

• Call for links! If you've written something cool that uses the SpaceOrb, send me a WWW link to your code or your WWW page and I'd like add it to this list.
• RasMol: Reece Hart at Washington University of St. Louis has written a patch that allows the Orb to be used with RasMol, a molecular visualization package. His patch may be obtained here: http://dasher.wustl.edu/~reece/RasMol/
• My Parallel Raytracing software: I've written an OpenGL previewer for my raytracing software which allows you to fly around in a scene using the SpaceOrb. Its done using a first person view, and was the code I simplified in order to write the "orbfly" demo which is included with LibOrb. The raytracer WWW page is _Here_ .

Questions, Feedback, and Support