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.

[jandro-air]

Some brief discussion with @kiselev-dv:

do you think we would be able to add a tilt element to the google maps integration on the touchscreen interface? right now it's locked to a 2D overhead view

just a tilt or it should be synchronized with something? and looks like gmaps support tilt only for sat view

ideally we could use maps tilt to get earth to tilt. in other words, an option to get rid of the spacenav (which we usually need for tilt)

I'm not sure that you can tilt gmaps with their regular version of API. there is a way to do that for mapbox or for gmaps but in sat mode (didn't check is that accessible through api)... but wount work because we can't add streetview coverage layer. we can tilt google maps (I suppose, didn't tried it) with some transforms for instance - but again it will sucks... mapbox + sv coverage layer might be possible but it's kinda against google's TOS