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Radar in LT and its ease of use in the UI

#1
First off - woohoo for Development update #18! :thumbup:
A lot of great stuff this month, but there is one thing that kept me from enjoying the video in entirety and I'm not talking about youtube compression or the content covered.

I'm talking about the current radar system in the user interface. If you take a look at the video you'll see the radar pulsating regularly despite the fact that there are no contacts showing up, no proximity alerts. Now I know how radar works but this is an instance where I feel the UI is making me do more work than is needed for the sake of familiarity and not efficiency.

To put it more plainly my focus migrates to the radar disc because movement is usually an indication of action but the action here is redundant, it merely says "hey, your radar is working!" and while that is great I don't need to "hear" that every time my peripheral vision is distracted by the pulses. Worse still it means I'm liable to pay less attention to the world itself and that can be really immersion breaking.

The UI I have seen from Josh so far has left me speechless in a good way so I'm not too worried about it being resolved as we're still quite a ways from release (which I approve of if it means a well polished V1) but I did want to mention it as I thought it was quite important.

As to how to solve it, I advise you steal Elite: Dangerous (example) and Star Citizen's method (example) of using a sphere instead of a circle. On a monitor you can still display artificial depth cues by dynamically shading contacts on the radar as they move closer to or further from the player on the y-axis (e.g. orange at the extreme aft of the radar's range and purple at its foremost reach, as a ship moves between these two extremes it changes colour.)

In the Rift it'll be much more straightforward.
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Well the concept of 3D radar is easy to understand in VR I mean. Integration is another kettle of fish.
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Who puts fish in a kettle? :eh:

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