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Navigating the globe with hand motions.
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The boats plotted on the map.
Inspiration
The way we interact with technology is rapidly changing. Within 50 years we've gone from command line, to keyboard, to touch screen, to... No screen? Sensors are getting better and better at tracking human movements and we wanted to do something to explore the potential.
What it does
We have a 3D globe on screen that can be navigated (swiped up/down/left/right, zoomed in/out) via hand movements. The Globe is populated with boats from a North Sea Shipping data set.
How we built it
We accessed the data source with a call to MongoDB in Java. The globe was created with Nasa's WorldWind program, which creates a 3d globe that can be populated with geospatial data. We use the Leap Motion Java SDK to track a number of hand gestures (swiping and tapping) which we translated into movement triggers for the 3d globe.
Challenges we ran into
We divided into teams to work on different components and we had troubles combining the Java projects together to work in sync. We learned much about java packages and libraries!
Our main difficulty was with the Leap Motion sensor - they cough up a lot of data and it was tricky to discern what we needed and how to bridge that into controlling our 3d globe.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We all met for the first time at this Hack and formed a team, so we're very proud of how well we worked together! Everyone was responsible for different parts of this project but we were also able to help each other when stuck on something.
We like how we visualised the ship data on the globe, and the progress we made with the Leap Motion sensor.
What we learned
The Leap Motion technology was new to all of us!
David: I'd never used MongoDB before, or a Leap Motion sensor.
Eilidh: I learned how to dig under the hood of behemoth java applications and how to poke them in the correct (and often incorrect) places.
Stephen: I learned to use Leap Motion, and more about Java file structures. I learned about plotting data points on graphs.
What's next for Team Gypsum
We'd like to get the Leap Motion sensor tracking our movements more accurately, so we can more smoothly control the globe. There were lots of features of Nasa's software that we didn't explore, like globe customisation and filters.
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