SmartGlobe - MATLAB GUI Project

Course: EEE 4416 - Simulation Lab in MATLAB
Semester: [4th] (summer of 2025)

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📌 Project Overview

SmartGlobe is an interactive GUI-based application that integrates a 3D globe with AI-powered conversational ability.
The aim was to allow users to click any location on the globe, extract latitude/longitude, and query an AI model (DeepSeek via OpenRouter) about that place (tourism, history, culture, food, etc.).

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🎯 Initial Plan

• Display an interactive 3D globe inside MATLAB.
• Allow users to click on any location → extract Latitude & Longitude.
• Send this location data to DeepSeek API via OpenRouter.
• Receive and display a conversational response about the selected location.

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⚠️ Limitations

1. MATLAB App Designer does not support globe interaction (geoaxes, geoglobe, inputgeo not functional).
2. Embedding Cesium ESM JS globe inside MATLAB App failed (uihtml too limited).
3. API restrictions:
   • OpenRouter (DeepSeek, Gemini) → blocked by MATLAB administration (token requests not allowed).
   • Direct API calls (DuckDuckGo, OpenStreetMap) from MATLAB → restricted.

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✅ Resolution / Workaround

• Instead of user input via globe clicks, the globe is used only for displaying output.
• Place queries are given manually (through text input).
• DuckDuckGo API → retrieves short descriptions of places.
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim API → fetches latitude & longitude of a location to reposition the globe camera.

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⚙️ CMD Integration (Using curl)

Since MATLAB cannot fetch APIs directly in App Designer, curl is used in the CMD to fetch JSON responses.

🔹 Example: DuckDuckGo API (get description)

curl -X GET "https://api.duckduckgo.com/?q=Dhaka&format=json" -o output.json
curl -X GET "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Dhaka&format=json&limit=1" -o coords.json