Alternative control methods

[jandro-air]

Overview: Oh, spacenav. It seems like there is a business case for thinking of alternative control methods to "simplify" the peripheral experience with an LG. One way of doing this would be to remove the spacenav entirely and control the system from the touchscreen interface.

Right now, our current touchscreen integration is by using Google Maps to emulate the camera position in Earth on the LG. Maps is limited to a 2D view, and is not necessarily 1:1 movement - someone must move maps and then Earth will adjust it's position. Since maps is limited to the 2D positioning, Earth is as well. In other words, no tilt w/o the spacenav.

Some ideas:

• Mirroring: build a sort of mirror globe (similar to cesium... or even using cesium) to navigate earth. Google Maps with tilt may be a good option as well (especially since we already have it integrated to some degree). The case for this "mirroring" idea is that most users have a cell phone and should instinctively understand how to manipulate the map / globe with the usual pinch, pan, and tilt gestures.

• Thumb "joysticks": some mobile games come with the ability to control a character in 3D space using on screen "joystick" areas similar to what may be found on an Xbox or Playstation controller. Could be worth seeing if we can emulate control of the LG camera using this method.

These are but two ideas that have come up recently, but we are always open to others.