You can’t easily rest your hand without the Earth/Leap driver interpreting that as “spin me around & crash me into the planet”. However, holding your hand “floating in the air” for minutes is very tiring. The Leap is a cool novelty for controlling Earth. I’ve been using a dev Leap Motion for a couple of months now with Earth – hands down (hah!) the SpaceNav is still the controller of choice for Google Earth. Google earth multitouch windows#It works for Windows and Mac, and you can pick one up at the 3DConnexion online store, or at a handful of specialty retailers. It’s a wonderful tool, and Google Earth simply wouldn’t be the same without it. Here we are years later and I still use mine every day. However, it was a piece of junk and the SpaceNavigator remained king. A year after the SpaceNavigator came out, Sandio released their “3D O2 mouse”, which was supposed to be even better - you could use it as a mouse, but it also had various 3D control sticks on it. To be honest, I expected that we’d see some competition to the SpaceNavigator by now, and perhaps the Leap Motion is finally it. You can also check out his review of Disney World 3D, which was done using the SpaceNavigator: You can get a pretty good idea of what it can do by watching this video that Frank made a while ago that showed off some of the basic features of it: I’ve told many people that using the SpaceNavigator made Google Earth feel brand new again. You can zoom in, while panning, while tilting a little more, to really feel like you’re flying around the world. Rather than having to pan, then zoom, then pan a little more, then tilt, etc, you can do it all in one motion. In a nutshell, the SpaceNavigator is a 3D mouse. I thought I should explain what a SpaceNavigator actually is for those that don’t yet know. Google earth multitouch android#I mentioned a while ago (in the comments) that the iPhone version of Google Earth (with multi-touch control) was similar to using a SpaceNavigator when compared to the single-touch version on Google Android devices (which has long since incorporated multi-touch as well). It’s been nearly seven years since Frank introduced the SpaceNavigator to all of us, and I thought it was time to give it another look. If I've whetted your appetite, go to Jeff's page and look at the demo reel ( MPEG or QuickTime).With the LeapMotion finally launching soon (hopefully), I thought it’d be fun to once again take a look at the current king of Google Earth controls - the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. As Jeff "drilled down" on the image of the globe, the satellite imagery seamlessly gave way to detailed street maps with buttons allowing you to bring up additional information about the area you were looking at. The really cool application was a type of "Google Earth on steroids." Imagine everything you can do with Google Earth, but doing it by touching a screen with particular gestures. Jeff also showed a drawing/animation application that allowed you to draw closed-loop shapes and then animate them by simply wiggling 1 or 2 fingers within the boundary of the shape. Google earth multitouch tv#That one looked like a great way to watch everything on TV at once. Jeff them demonstrated the same type of application displaying live video streams (somewhere over 100 streams!). was a type of photo album that allowed you to move images around, resize them by pinching or spreading your fingers, and rotate them by moving putting down 2 fingers and making a circular motion. Jeff had 2 game boards on the screen at the same time, allowing 2 people to play against each other (modulo enough processor power underneath to do all the math and re-drawing work).Īnother demo app. One of the demo applications was a game where the object is to move around nodes on a graph in order to eliminate crossed connection lines. Their technique allows you to touch the panel at many points simultaneously, enabling a very complex yet intuitive user interface.Īs you might imagine, it is possible for multiple people to use the interface at the same time, allowing new methods of collaboration and interaction. There are LEDs shining light into the sides of the panel and when you touch the panel, your finger (or whatever you touch it with) scatters the internally reflected light which is then picked up by sensors beneath the panel. Jeff Han from NYU showed their multi-touch user interface, "and the crowd went wild." The interface consists of an angled acrylic panel with a projector beneath it. I just saw the most incredible demo here at ETech 06.
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