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The interface is designed to fulfill three main goals in mind:

#1: Arjun wants to see locations his son Raj mentions while they are on a call (in realtime)

#2: Arjun wants to explore those location (interactively) while talking

#3: Arjun wants to take a deep tour of some places after the call (in leisure time).

Arjun and Raj use Skype for calling and thus this interface tries to facilitate these tasks through an interface that looks very similar to skype.

This interface is inspired from Skype Interface

Left sidebar (3 main links)

Contacts (to see all the contacts)
Recent (it shows recent 10 contacts -- efficiency)
History (History of all the chats/calls)
Top bar (search for any location)
The Main Pane It is the main window for the active tab (in this case -- Contacts Tab)
For each contact shows the status (online/offline/away)
- you can make a call
- see a log of all previous callsThe interface (see the home page) uses the user mental model of chatting, calling and video calling
  Most popular tool used by people for international calling is Skype -- this user interface is consistent with Skype interface

A call session (goal #2)

Video/Audio call going on
Whenever a location is encountered in the conversation, Arjun is prompted by the system -- "Location detected -- Stata Center" with a button, "Take Me There"
Clicking on that button opens a direct manipulation interactive Stata Center map.
The interactive, direct manipulation interface helps Arjun explore Stata Center by navigating through the 3D map, varying altitude and changing camera angels. (this is an interactive direct manipulation interface) synchronized with the call interface.

Arjun wants to explore the place after the call. He goes to Teleport and puts MIT Stata Center and clicks the button "Take Me here" (goal #3)

It opens a direct manipulation 3D interactive map which provides Arjun a way to explore a place by
- navigating through the map,
- varying altitude, and
- changing camera angle
  Alternatively, Arjun can go to history, pulls up the location from there and opens in the same 3D interactive location explorer.

The interface (see the home page) uses the user mental model of chatting, calling and video calling
Most popular tool used by people for international calling is Skype -- this user interface is consistent with Skype interface
Auto-highlighting of locations is consistent with hovering affordance (people are likely to hover over highlighted text)
Consistent choice of keys (arrows for camera angels, page up and page down for altitude and W,S,A,D for movement)

For direct manipulation -- only keyboard inputs (navigation controls, camera controls and altitude) to avoid switching latency (switching time between keyboard/mouse)
Avoids any effect of mouse sensitivity
Allows random exploration (the text box on the top allows any valid location as an input) -- jumping from SFO to Boston is very easy.
Autosuggest, and auto-complete

For screen 3: if location recognizer fails to recognize a location or recognizes wrong location, user can change it. Also, there is auto-suggest.
The interface is extremely safe because use can change location, camera angle, altitude, direction at any point of time as per their choice.
A complete freedom for navigation -- (if you moved a little far ahead, you can come back, if altitude is not perfect, you can change the altitude). It provides safety against all user errors.

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