Gestural navigation in Google Earth

Geographical Information Systems (GISs) are playing an increasingly important role in society. Not only have the capabilities of GIS packages expanded, but their spectrum has been widened by the popularisation of software such as Google Earth, which has added an extra dimension to navigation, while still using the same interaction method. We argue that traditional GIS interfaces limit productivity by not being sufficiently intuitive to new users and by causing extra delay due to unnecessary modality. As a step on the road to solving these problems, we propose an ideal gesture-based system and present the results of a mostly qualitative user-experiment on our current prototype for gestural navigation in Google Earth, which back up our assumptions about the importance of gestural interactions being both bimanual and simultaneous.