Tangible World

 
Tangible World
Dirk de Wit, Stuart Altman, Naya Loumou, Olivia Bigazzi
 
The Broad Idea:
We would like to create an interactive globe that produces information about a continent, region or land when physically touched by the user.  This touch will cause the information regarding that region to be shown on a digital screen where it can then be manipulated.  In order to not just focus on input, but also on output we would like to create a system where one can search for a region on the digital screen and have the globe rotate to the correct location.  
 
We believe this tool would be useful in education.  Our subject would be elementary students (ages 6-12).  The object of our system is to create a fun, intuitive learning opportunity to promote knowledge of the world we live in.
 
Milestones:

1. We would like to prove our concept first on a 2D tabletop map system.
2. We will first tackle the physical input of touch by lighting up the cities.
3. Then we will tackle the digital output of data retrieval.
   1. Wikipedia integration
   2. Google maps integration
4. The next phase is to implement the output movement of the globe by porting a Google Map search to simple motoric movements.
5. Next we will try to implement a more advanced input mechanism in which the region touched by the user will raise and the major cities of that area light up.
6. Once these steps have been implemented we will scale up to the 3D globe system which will embody the above proposed implementations.