More compact VR Toolbar user interface

[Tom Goddard]

The ChimeraX toolbar is the most useful GUI in VR but is cumbersome to use. Showing the GUI panels shows a menu bar, Log and Model panels and possibly others like Volume Viewer that are seldom useful. But those not very useful panels take up almost all of the visual space. Showing the panels centers on that stack of panels so the Toolbar is usually out of reach too high up and so always all the panels need to be repositioned. Then the often needed Right Mouse toolbar is far too wide to reach all the icons, so it often has to be repositioned to even reach the desired icon. This is extremely clumsy user interface. It was a significant impediment in a VR demo to 3 biophysics students for an hour on hemoglobin and a sickle cell anemia mutation I gave last week.

I think the VR user interface that appears should be only the Toolbar. Another click could show other panels if desired. Or the other panels could all be stacked as tabs with the toolbar. The Toolbar should have multiple rows so it is not too wide. The current toolbar probably cannot support multiple rows and it is probably hard because icon category labels probably require whole categories to be on one row.

This seems like a most critical improvement to make VR more usable.

[Tom Goddard]

Should also rename Right Mouse toolbar to "Set VR button actions". Also add some text for that toolbar that says "Click on an icon with any controller button to assign that action to the controller button."

[Tom Goddard]

Maybe I implement an alternate multirow toolbar panel specifically for VR. It could conceivably even replicate the main menus. And starting VR could automatically stack all tool panels and put the toolbar panel on top.