trouble accessing objects inside of 3d cube

Question

my link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7727742/playlistsite6/index5.html

I have a 3d cube using a variation of zachstronaut's demo (link: http://www.zachstronaut.com/lab/galaxy-box/ ). It uses javascript, translate3d, scale3d, etc...

I've tried assigning different z-index values in the css file, but with no luck. I can access the objects outside the cube(you can see this with the hover effect), but not the objects inside the cube. I have a hunch it is because it's not doing a z-sort type of function like pre3d.js. I was wondering if anyone could offer some insight into where I should look for a solution.

Object coordinates are generated randomly, so you may have to refresh once or twice to get some objects that are inside the cube.

Thanks!

EDIT:

Only tested in safari and chrome dev

Answer 1

Webkit ignores z-indexes on anything that has translate3d defined, as it logically should. z-index is meant for a 2D world, it's like taking a bunch of paper and saying "this one is on top" -- you still have a flat surface. Unfortunately, if you want to be able to select one of the "stars" inside of your box, you're all but out of luck since you're using HTML nodes.

The normal way of doing this is using a click-map -- basically every object gets rendered twice. Once normally and once in a single color with no shading, etc. The 2nd rendering is never shown and is simply used to tell what the user clicked on. You get the color where they clicked and that color maps to a specific object. If you were using canvas, you would do it that way and just change the rendering order on the 2nd render.

Since you're using HTML nodes, you can't do that. You have a couple of options:

• You can calculate which star is under the mouse on mouse-move based on viewport rotation and x/y/z position of the star
• you can attempt the above method by overlaying an identical rendering without the cube and where the stars have a 0% opacity. Each star in your new rendering would map to a star in your existing one, and you'd have easy mouse-over detection.

Post the results! :)

Answer 2

First of all, I'm glad you found my demo interesting!

You're not going to have much luck trying to do a hover or capture a click event on objects inside of a 3D CSS3 cube for the exact same reason you wouldn't have much luck capturing a hover or click events on a div underneath another div... in HTML all the DOM events go to the top most DOM node. If one div overlaps another div, you can't click the one that is underneath. Everything inside the 3D cube is "underneath" another DOM node.

Things are further complicated because you're taking objects in 3D space and asking a user to interact with them on a 2D plane (the browser window) using a 2D input device (the mouse).

You could hide the faces of the cube so that they wouldn't block the user's clicks. You could do something like cwolves suggested.

Sorry I couldn't be more help... HTML kind of fails us a bit here. Welcome to the bleeding edge!