3D mouse support

Allows the use of a 3D mouse to rotate ones figures.

Description

Mathworks really should support the 3D mouse by default, but until they do I created a simple hack to allow one to use a 3D mouse to rotate a figure.

The function connects to the mouse driver COM object and uses a timer function to poll the mouse position and rotation. To prevent excessive resource use the time step is increased when the mouse is not in use.

Some more work is needed, but hopefully this will inspire Mathworks to include support for a 3D mouse in the next release.

Visit http://www.3dconnexion.com/ to find out what a 3D mouse is.

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; 3D mouse support using classes and events
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.5 (R2007b)
• Other requirements: An installed and working 3D mouse.

[Jerome Hoepffner]

Hello, thank you very much for this function. I newly became a happy owner of the 3Dmouse, but I have a MacIntosh, thus the COM as well as serial I/O are not supported for me ;-(. Do you know how I could proceed? I don't know much about these...

[Vihang Patil]

I get this error message
??? Error using ==> actxserver at 91
Server creation failed. Invalid ProgID 'TDxInput.Device'

Error in ==> Mouse3D>mouse3D_start at 170
  srv = actxserver('TDxInput.Device');

Error in ==> Mouse3D at 104
      [srv,tim] = mouse3D_start(period,timertag);

Do we need any specific toolbox for it? I am using R2007b

[Gus Brown]

I doub't its a problem with Matlab, but a problem with the 3Dmouse divers.
I guess you don't have the same 3DConnexion mouse drivers that I have. Or maybe you dont have them installed.

[Ben]

This is great! It would be even better if it rotated the object rather than the camera. I may play with that.