3Dconnexion Forum

Following Google's announcement of the availability of Google Earth version 7.3.4, we can confirm the update addresses the limitations with 3D mouse use on macOS 11, closing the MAC-264 issue. The release notes for Google Earth are available here.

A word of appreciation to the Google Earth team: the engineering team at 3Dconnexion would like to thank you for collaborating to resolve this issue. No separate team would have been able to resolve this problem on its own since it required changes to both Google Earth and driver.

Cheers, GE!

ben simons wrote: ↑Wed Jul 07, 2021 6:45 pm we would ALSO love Google Earth to work again!!

Google has looked into this and 3D mouse support will soon be available. We discussed this issue elsewhere in this topic (see here).

so we don't need to beg for fixes? ... Perhaps we could help fix it?

What are you looking to see fixed?

The new-style has a different dongle which allows multiple (up to 4?) SMs to connect.

I think you are referring to a device we name "Universal Receiver". It can pair up to five CadMouse or SpaceMouse devices.

Total is 13-bytes.

The more recent SpaceMouse devices use a "long" report. This is 13 bytes, yes.

it seems the OSX Driver blocks access to the SM?

This is new in macOS 11. Our driver daemon now has to get an exclusive "hold" of the device. Failing to do this has the system using the device data to control the mouse pointer. In older versions of the operating system, our daemon didn't need to "grab" device exclusively since we used a kernel extension to prevent the erroneous behaviour. Apple deprecated kernel extensions in macOS 10.15 and support was removed in macOS 11.

To test this, kill the daemon process ("3DconnexionHelper") before attempting to connect to the device. Killing the daemon prevents other applications from using the device (since the daemon works as a broker).

Update: Google is now investigating the Big Sur / Google Earth / SpaceNavigator problem!

After growing increasingly impatient watching this forum for a number of months, I queried the "Google Earth Help" Community forum to see if anyone closer to Google had experienced the problems we've encountered.

The very helpful "Alchemist251" sent the problem to the right people and now we can sit back and cross our fingers!

More here: https://support.google.com/earth/thread/102053905