Timeline for Why is it intuitive to have the up and down arrow keys reversed in flight simulation games?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
6 events
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| Mar 14, 2011 at 16:26 | comment | added | Grace Note♦ | @Jefromi Try thinking of it not mapping to the back of your head, but to the front of your head - like if a joystick were sticking out of your nose. If you were to rotate that to onto a horizontal plane and maintain the left-right direction, then the direction that corresponded to facing upwards becomes "back", while looking down becomes "forward". This mimicks using the Up Arrow to look down, and the Down Arrow to look up, as from the keyboard perspective Up is Forwards, and Down is Backwards. | |
| Mar 14, 2011 at 13:31 | comment | added | Cascabel | Well, the problem is that a mouse doesn't have the same degrees of freedom as the joystick. Ultimately, you're moving the mouse the same direction as the back of your head moves - up to tilt down... so left to rotate right. It sort of makes more sense if you think of the mouse plane as horizontal instead of vertical, so that it's mimicking the top of the joystick... except for the fact that to mimic the motion of the head, turning left should be a twist, not a tilt of the joystick. (I do still find inverted Y perfectly intuitive, just pointing out that our intuition here isn't perfect.) | |
| Mar 14, 2011 at 13:11 | comment | added | tenfour | @Jefromi: "To see left, I tilt my head right"? That doesn't work in the X axis. Even if there is a way to explain it logically, it's not how we think of it, which is what matters. | |
| Mar 14, 2011 at 13:08 | comment | added | Cascabel | If you follow the logic of your second option all the way through, you should invert the X axis too. | |
| Mar 14, 2011 at 2:14 | comment | added | Fara | I agree with choice number two. You tilt your head forward to look down, tilt it back to look up. Inverting the Y axis allows you to mimic natural head movement. | |
| Mar 13, 2011 at 22:24 | history | answered | tenfour | CC BY-SA 2.5 |