A new project by Teehan+Lax, the Toronto-based design firm that helped created Ev Williams’ Medium publishing platform, builds on its previous work with Hyperlapse to provide a way to navigate Google Street View with just a wave of your hand. The experiment uses the same engine as Hyperlapse, and takes advantage of an early developer version Leap Motion controller unit to give a user a very cool way to navigate Google Street View.
It looks a little like how some of us might have imagined we’d be navigating the Internet in general by now, asked to picture what computing would be like in 15 years time back in 1998, but actually much more intuitive and natural-looking than anything we likely would’ve conceived of back then. The Leap Motion looks to be an extremely accurate tool in terms of controlling speed with up and down positioning of the hand, and in detecting subtle planar shifts as the tester tilts his hand side-to-side.
I was already excited about getting my hands on my own Leap Motion pre-order, but the potential of using something like this to virtually drive something like the Atlantic Road in Norway or the Iroha-zaka in Japan make its arrival even more anticipated.
