Map Gesture Controls
Alex
For most of us interactive maps are controlled with a mouse, a trackpad or touch gestures. However, some developers are exploring alternative ways to navigate maps without ever touching a keyboard or screen.
Non-keyboard controls could prove especially useful for accessibility, allowing people with limited mobility to interact with maps more easily. Two recent projects demonstrate different approaches to keyboard-free map interaction. Map Gesture Controls uses a webcam to interpret hand gestures as map controls, while Alex allows users to navigate and style a map using simple voice commands.
Control Maps with Hand Gestures
Map Gesture Controls is an impressive new library that allows users to navigate web maps using hand gestures captured through a webcam. The project works with OpenLayers, the Google Maps API and Leaflet, making it easy to integrate into a wide range of mapping applications.
Under the hood the library uses MediaPipe Hand Landmarker to detect 21 three-dimensional landmarks on a user’s hand directly in the browser. Different gestures are then mapped to common map interactions:
- Left fist or pinch gestures pan the map
- Right fist or pinch gestures zoom
- Two hands rotate the map
- Any other position leaves the map idle
All configuration settings, including webcam overlays and gesture tuning, are shared across adapters.
Talk to Your Maps
While gesture controls provide one kind of hands free interaction, Alex explores another: voice controlled maps.
Alex is a simple but effective demo (using Leafletjs) showing how speech recognition can be used to control a map through natural language commands. Users begin commands with “Alex” followed by instructions such as:
- “Alex, zoom in”
- “Alex, zoom out”
- “Alex, set map to imagery”
- “Alex, set map to topographic”
- “Alex, go to crater lake”
Voice interfaces for maps have huge potential. They could make navigation interfaces more accessible, improve safety in hands-busy situations and provide a more natural way to interact with geographic information. Voice commands also feel particularly well suited to map search and navigation tasks, where users often already think in conversational terms (“show me Paris”, “zoom into downtown”, “find nearby parks”).
Of course voice control still faces challenges. Background noise, accents and speech recognition accuracy can all affect usability. Gesture controls have their own hurdles too, especially around fatigue and reliability. But both projects hint at a future where interacting with maps becomes more natural, multimodal and accessible.
Perhaps the days of endlessly pinching and dragging maps around with our fingers are numbered.
