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Comment by htgb | Hacker News Reader

Both scrolling and panning (dragging) feels inverted to me! Specifically, it behaves the opposite way to for example Google Maps. (Scrolling away from the computer, towards me, takes me closer to the map. Dragging doesn't keep that map pixel under the cursor, but drags the "camera" around.)

The visualisation itself was cool, if a bit slow in Firefox on my laptop.

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The camera works exactly like it would in a 3D editing software. Felt 100% intuitive to me.

Think of it as grabbing a model physically moving it vs. you controlling camera across a 3D scene.

Edit: Or perhaps, you being the city in third person vs. you being the camera in first person.

No, it doesn't. If you "grab" a point closer to yourself than the axis of rotation, then yes, it kind of acts like it should, but if you grab something far away then the rotation direction doesn't flip as it would in other software. This breaks the illusion that you're grabbing the model. It would probably be fine if they went with the opposite model ("grabbing the viewport"), as long as they kept it consistent, but they don't and it makes it feel out of place.

Where you click doesn't matter.

You need to double click somewhere to recenter.

How are the controls any different than say, the 3D viewer on this website: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/9D6rDxE5U3Z-delorean-dmc-ti... ?

I was unable to control it properly and gave up.

I second this. I'd also add that the inputs are way too sensitive. Moving my mouse only a couple of pixels completely inverts the visualization! It's basically impossible to exert any fine-grained control.

Scroll zoom direction preference is basically a toss up, but the panning seems natural to me.

Seemed perfectly intuitive to me. The sensitivity could be a bit lower tho.

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