[OSM-talk] OpenTrailView: StreetView for footpaths and trails

Nick Whitelegg Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk
Wed Mar 24 10:42:33 GMT 2010


Hi,

(*posted to talk in case of interest, but all follow ups will be on the 
Photos list*)

Having been, I have to admit, just a little impressed with the current 
state of Google Street View in the UK (i.e. it's now complete), my 
interest in developing "StreetView for footpaths" has been resurrected.

So I'd like to announce the initial version of OpenTrailView at :

http://www.free-map.org.uk/otv/

OpenTrailView (OTV) is a little different to OpenStreetView, but there are 
significant overlaps. OTV focuses on panoramas, i.e. 360 degree 
photographic views from a particular point, and is solely concerned with 
off-road views, not street views. The eventual aim is to build something 
like StreetView for the world's footpaths, trails and publicly-accessible 
wild places.

At the moment it's pretty basic. Nonetheless you can:

* Submit a panorama. 
* Align a panorama with a footpath. There are two sample panoramas in the 
system already, one is just north of the default view, one is a few miles 
southeast. You can rotate the camera icon by dragging it, to align the 
panorama with the footpath it's on. One of the two samples is a street 
view BTW, but that's just for testing purposes.
* View a panorama by moving the mouse over the camera icon.

Current immediate future plans are:

* Try and standardise on the dimensions of the panorama in pixels. This is 
more a photography than a software issue - so any ideas here would be most 
welcome!
* More in the way of instructions
* Take a good sample of panoramas in a countryside area near me (New 
Forest) and actually start developing a StreetView-like app.

I realise this is somewhat re-writing what's already been done in the main 
OpenStreetView site, but TBH Rails and me don't mix that well and I 
figured it would be easier for me to start from scratch using PHP :-)

Nick




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