1. This will turn the PeasyCam off/on.  In doing so, it disables all the handlers.
Code:

camera.setMouseControlled(false);  //PeasyCam off
camera.setMouseControlled(true);  //PeasyCam on 

If you truly want to remove the 3d centered focus (reset), you can do this.
Code:

camera(); 

2. Draw the rect as the last thing in the sketch.  Might need to add this:
Code:

hint(DISABLE_DEPTH_TEST); 

Next Question:

MrFeinberg, can you please :
make
camera.rotateX(double angle);  // rotate around the x-axis passing through the subject
camera.rotateY(double angle);  // rotate around the y-axis passing through the subject
camera.rotateZ(double angle);  // rotate around the z-axis passing through the subject

with an entry
, long animationTimeInMillis);

That'd be pretty cool!

Greetings, Chrisir

I actually can't do what you folks are asking for. It's hard to explain the reason, but it has to do with the difference between the other setFoo methods (which all set some property to specific value) and the rotateFoo methods (which *change* the current value by the given amount). There's no good semantics for what to do if some rotateX is running and then you call rotateY. Do I set the target rotation to whatever it happens to be at this moment, plus the new Y rotation? Do I add the Y rotation to the current target rotation? If so, how do I separate the two different animation speeds?

The PeasyCam rotation is not stored as 3 separate angles; it's stored as a single quaternion. The only way I could give you an animatable rotation would be to expose the underlying commons.math.Rotation object, which is something I really don't want to do (because it would suddenly make the PeasyCam interface much more complicated, and expose an internal implementation detail that's best left abstracted, I think).

rotateX() changes the current rotation of the camera around the X axis by the given amount. You could rotateX(someSmallNumber) once per frame, for a while. But you wouldn't want to "countup a", because that would accelerate the rotation.