For seasoned travellers and anyone trying to decide where to go to next , finding somewhere that ticks all the boxes is becoming more difficult . Internet information overload can dull the enthusiasm and make you wonder if it’s all worthwhile .
Step up Caroline Buttet’s do-it-yourself solution which might offer a bit of help. OK , looking at pictures of someone else enjoying themselves just reminds you of how long it is since you took a holiday yourself — but it at least makes the experience a bit more fun for the viewer.
Buttet has created an intuitive solution – a touch-sensitive globe that displays the photos belonging to whichever country you tap. “Globe Trotter is a tangible picture viewer, especially designed to make vacation picture viewing more enjoyable,” she comments.
“It consists of an interactive globe that is linked to a computer via an Arduino, which interacts with a webpage. It allows the user to browse pictures ordered by country, by physically touching any country on the globe. The user can then spin the globe back and forth to view the images, like in a slideshow.”
Building a capacitive globe sounds like hard work. In fact, Buttet achieved the effect using a (relatively) simple hack: She stuck a thumbtack in each country, with the sharp end inside the globe connecting to a wire that links to the Arduino.
“Globe Trotter is just a proof of concept, and therefore there is still a lot of improvements that can be made,” she continued. “These include things like integration of geotags, automatic sorting of photos, and finding a way to make it wireless. I made the prototype just for fun, with no thought of commercializing it or anything like that. But lately I’ve started to get requests from people over the internet. If enough people are interested, maybe I’ll publish the code and go open source at some point.”
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