Perspective on Flutter

Fun with 3D and the Transform widget

tl;dr — The Transform widget allows you to do amazing things in your Flutter apps. Here’s a one-minute video showing off what developers have done with Transform widgets:

This article builds a simple demo program that shows how to use Flutter’s Transform widget to provide 3D perspective, a graphic demonstration of the ease with which Flutter can do something that would be rather difficult to implement in a system based on native widgets. It is also fun to play with!

Here’s the app we are going to build in action (the little circle reflects the position of the user’s finger on the screen):

Getting started

This example starts with the familiar default Flutter app — what you get when you do a flutter create or use your IDE to generate a new Flutter project. We are going to add two new things to this app: a Transform widget and a GestureDetector widget.

First the transform:

Running this code shows the default app being transformed slightly in 3D, with perspective:

We also removed some things we didn’t need, including all the extra comments, and (in honor of Dart 2) all the new keywords. For demonstration purposes we moved the layout part of the default app (the build method of _MyHomePageState) to a separate method called _defaultApp (lines 49–74). And for simplicity we set the AppBar title on line 52, rather than passing it as a parameter to MyHomePage.

Transform widget

The added Transform widget is on lines 39–46. Let’s look at this more closely. Transform takes a 3D transformation matrix, which is a Matrix4. Why a 3D matrix? Isn’t Flutter for two-dimensional graphics? Well, kind of.

Pretty much all but the least powerful smartphones include amazingly fast GPUs, which are optimized for 3D graphics. That means that rendering 3D graphics is very fast. Consequently, almost everything you see on your phone is being rendered in 3D, even the 2D stuff. Crazy, huh?

Setting the transformation matrix lets us manipulate what is being viewed (in 3D even!). Common transformations include translate, rotate, scale, and perspective. To create this matrix we start with an identity matrix (line 40) and then apply transformations to it. Transformations are not commutative, so we have to apply them in the right order. The final complete matrix will be sent to the GPU to transform the objects being rendered.

Transformations are a complicated subject, but if you want to learn more about them you can read any introduction to 3D graphics on transformation matrices and homogeneous coordinates.

Perspective

The first transformation (on line 41) implements perspective. Perspective makes objects that are farther away appear smaller. Setting row 3, column 2 of the matrix to 0.001 scales things down based on their distance.

Where did the number 0.001 come from? Thin air! You can play with this number to increase and decrease the amount of perspective, something like zooming in and out with a zoom lens on a camera. The bigger this number, the more pronounced is the perspective, which makes it look like you are closer to the viewed object.

Flutter does provide a makePerspectiveMatrix function but that method includes arguments for setting the aspect ratio, field of view, and near and far planes — way more than we need — so we will just set the required element of the matrix directly.

Rotations

Next on lines 42 and 43 we apply two rotations based on the value of the _offset variable (from line 29; later we will use this variable to track the position of the user’s finger). Curiously, the X rotation is based on the Y offset, and the Y rotation is based on the X offset. Why?

Consider this image, which has added green arrows showing the X and Y axes for the display. The default origin of these axes is the upper left corner of the display (which is why the Y axis points down), but our program sets the origin (in line 44) to be the center of the display .

Rotation is defined about an axis, so rotateX defines rotation around the X axis, which tilts in the Y (up-down) direction. Likewise, rotateY tilts in the X (left-right) direction (around the Y axis). That’s why rotateX is controlled by _offset.dy and rotateY is controlled by _offset.dx.

There is also a Z axis, whose origin is at the surface of the screen running perpendicular to the screen through the phone and out the back, so that the Z value goes positive the further away a thing is from the viewer. Consequently, the rotateZ method rotates in the plane of the display.

Interaction

The second and final thing we are going to add is a GestureDetector widget. This is very easy in Flutter.

In line 28, _offset is initialized to zero. Lines 44–48 define a GestureDetector that detects two kinds of gestures: pan gestures (e.g., a finger moving around the screen) and double tap gestures. Line 45 adds the amount of pan movement (in pixels) to _offset. Line 46 resets the _offset to zero when the user double taps the display. For both of these gestures, setState() schedules the display to be redrawn.

Finally, lines 41 and 42 are modified so that the offset (in pixels) is scaled by a factor of 0.01 to make it better to use for rotation (which is in radians, where a complete rotation is 2π — approximately 6.28 — so a complete rotation requires a pan movement of 628 pixels). You can play with the scale factor to make the rotation more or less sensitive to finger movement. Also, the parameter to rotateY is negated because as the finger moves to the right, the image rotates counter-clockwise around the Y axis (because the Y axis is pointing downward).

Done!

In Flutter, almost everything is in the app itself (rather than in the platform), including the widgets and renderer. This gives great flexibility. In this case, we had easy access to powerful features provided by the GPU, and even a widget to help us. Our changes consist of a mere 13 lines of code. Not bad!

Note that after you rotate the default app around the X or Y axis, you might have difficulty tapping the FAB to increment the counter. Flutter does compensate for most transforms, including scale and rotateZ, so the UI will still work properly in those cases, but it has some problems with full 3D transforms. We’re working on fixing that.

Of course, none of the objects in the default app are actually 3D. They are all 2D (flat) objects (even the faux shadows cast by the AppBar and FAB). But that doesn’t stop us from spinning them around in 3D space.

Further ideas

There is so much you could do with this simple program, often with just a few lines of code:

• Make the same changes to some app that is more complex than the default app.
• Add a spin around the Z axis, using rotateZ.
• Change the amount of perspective so that it is a negative number. What do you think will happen?
• Translate the FAB a bit in the negative Z direction so that it is floating slightly above the body of the Scaffold widget. For extra points, create a “real” shadow instead of a faux one.
• Add an animation so that when the user’s finger releases from the screen the app keeps spinning, slowing down to a stop. You can do this with the onPanEnd argument to the GestureDetector, which provides the velocity of the finger (in pixels per second) as it loses contact with the screen.
• Create a 3D transition between two screens or tabs in an app. For example, like turning the pages of a book, or one screen spinning and becoming another.

If you think of other ideas, let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: A shout out to the article “Make 3D flip animation in Flutter”, which references this article to add perspective to a flip animation, like this: