Digital Geography

Geography teachers who like to wave their arms around a lot whilst expostulating may well be interested in Atlas Gloves. It’s an interface to Google Earth that interprets hand gestures. First announced back in May, Ogle Earth reports that the application is now ready to download. A web cam and a pair of DIY illuminated gloves are the other requirements.

Update

I’m very happy to report success, though it took a long time to figure out how to get the application working. I followed advice on the Atlas Gloves forum and installed a further program called WinVDig which links a video feed to QuickTime. I had no luck until I uninstalled WinVDig and tried an earlier version. With much relief I finally got my webcam running properly and within a few minutes the gloves were on and working. For best results you need to be some distance from the webcam. The next obstacle will be setting it all up on my school laptop without the network manager finding out!
For others trying this project, I can recommend PoundLand in the UK for cheap LED keyrings. I used a Logitech QuickCam STX from PC World which came with headphones for podcasting as well! I’ve got a Windows PC with XP Pro and Google Earth 4 beta. I installed the latest version of Java and QuickTime as suggested by the Atlas Gloves site as well as Processing 0115 and version 1.1 of WinVDig from here – note this is not the latest version that you obtain from the WinVDig site.