[Joker_vD]

I am suggesting that the whole keyboard can lock during the time the physical ball rotates; the comptometers and pinwheel arithmometers of the yore had this functionality: while the mechanism was performing the addition of the number just entered, the user was blocked from fiddling with the input mechanism.

[kevindamm]

I get that's what you're suggesting. The locking per-axis or across all axes is fine but doesn't address the problem I'm talking about. In gimbal lock, which many graphics programmers first encounter by using only sequential rotations around the camera's axes, you can get into an orientation where you lose one of the three degrees of freedom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock