Initial Codebase by Huyen Tran, Tatiana Iskandar, Hyunggu Jung, Daniel Strazzulla, and Daniel Onggunhao
Kinect-Earth is a project for Prof. Jeff Heer's Human-Computer Interaction course (CS247) at Stanford University. It won the overall best design award, out of more 14 projects for that course.
It combines a custom Google Earth physics engine with a gesture controller built for the Kinect, to allow users to navigate Google Earth's 3D virtual world using their bodies. Simple, intuitive and intensity-sensitive gestures create a natural user interface.
Move forward/backward: Move right foot forwardbackward
Turn left/right: Rotate your shoulders left/right. The more you rotate, the greater the turn
Jetpack: Hold your arms in a "jetpack" gesture (picture coming soon). Raise your hands to your shoulder to increase altitude, hold it at 90 degree angles to hover, and drop your hands to fall back to earth.
Augmented Reality: Do a "birdwatcher" gesture to see tweets an other metadata around your current location