Panoramascope : Augmented Reality
- 31st January 2010: New Wikipedia Layers
- I've now added an additional layer for each geographic region containing features listed on
Wikipedia pages that have co-ordinates. In all there are about 700,000 features, with just over half of
them in Europe. This data is distributed on the same Creative Commons terms as the OpenStreetMap
data.
- 31st December 2009: New Canadian Peaks Layer
- I've just added a new layer of Canadian Peaks; you'll find this at the bottom of the
North America section of the Available Layers screen. This is based on data from geonames.org,
which I presume came originally from Natural Resources Canada, and has significantly better
coverage than the North American Peaks layer from openstreetmap.org. This geonames.org data
is distributed on Creative Commons Attribution Required terms.
- 30th November 2009: New Augmented Reality app released
- The newest iPhone contains a compass, and apps can now superimpose content over the camera
view. This makes possible "Augmented
Reality", and a new Panoramascope app called Panoramascope: Augmented Reality is now
available. The old app has been withdrawn from sale, but will continue to work i.e. it can continue to
download terrain data. The new app has various other new features including the ability to save and
export views. It has been released as a new app, rather than as an update to the existing app, because
it will work only with the iPhone 3GS.
- 22nd May 2009: Alaska and Northern Canada and 70,000 U.S. Peaks added
- A new version of the Panoramascope is now available from the app store. This
version, 1.2, adds support for Alaska and Northern Canada. These areas beyond 60 N are
not covered by the original NASA SRTM data, but are included in the NED and CDED data
that I've recently started using. (The Canadian coverage currently only goes to 70 N; if
you want to take your Panoramascope with you on your trip to the pole, please let me
know.) I've also recently added a new layer file that you'll find at the bottom of the
"Available Layers" screen; this layer is based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey
and pinpoints more than 70,000 summits. Altogether this should give significantly better
results for users in N America; here is a view somewhere in Alaska:
- 15th May 2009: Canadian Data Upgrade
- Following on from yesterday's upgrade of the U.S. data, I've now upgraded
the data for Canada to use the Canadian government's CDED dataset. I believe this will give
better results than SRTM for mountainous areas. It took me a while to get the areas on the US/Canada
border right; if you find any problems, e.g. in border areas, do please let me know. Here I
am in front of Mount Assiniboine last summer on the trip when I dreamt up the idea of the
Panoramascope; Assiniboine was rather truncated in the SRTM data.
- 14th May 2009: U.S. Data Upgrade
- The NASA SRTM data that the Panoramascope uses is generally good, but in some
cases better terrain data is available. In the United States the U.S. Geological
Survey has a dataset called "NED" that is derived from topographical maps, and I have
now replaced the SRTM data with NED for the contiguous U.S. In many areas you won't
see much difference, but in areas of steep terrain NED is definitely better. To use
the new data you just need to select "Delete cached terrain data" and the new data
will be loaded as needed. For example, here's a view of the Grand Canyon using the
new data:
- 12th May 2009: Website update for mobiles
- I've just made some changes to this website that should be invisible to normal
web browsers, but which will cause it to display better if you're using Safari on an
iPhone or some other mobile browser. All the same words and images are included but, for
example, the multi-column layouts are reduced to a single column. Let me know if you see any
problems.
- 12th April 2009: Panoramascope in Japanese!
- I was delighted to find this page: http://pencil-jp.net/weblog/archives/2009/04/guide-panoramascope.html
which gives a step-by-step description of the Panoramascope in Japanese, with
translations and even a screenshot showing a photo with a mountain superimposed.
(I'm tempted to guess that it's Mt Fuji, but that's just because it's the only
Japanese mountain I can name...). Many thanks to the author for writing this up.
I'm afraid that support for non-latin character sets is limited: I think that
it should be possible to use any character in the viewpoint name field (and
hence in the recent and favourite viewpoints lists), but it isn't possible to
search for places with non-latin names (accented characters are matched but the
accent is ignored), nor to display non-latin characters in layer markers.
- 3rd April 2009: Version 1.1 available
- Version 1.1 of the Panoramascope is now available. This version extends the
latitude limits beyond 60 degrees N and S so that new terrain data supplied by
Jonathan de Ferranti for Greenland, Iceland, Shetland, Scandinavia, parts of N
Siberia and parts of Antarctica can be included. It also adds a "Go to Topo
Maps" option, as described below.
- 13th March 2009
- Users in the U.S. will be interested in my latest iPhone / iPod touch app,
Topo Maps. It's a viewer for U.S.G.S.
topographic maps, which it downloads for offline viewing. It includes an option to go
to the Panoramascope to see the view from the point at the centre of the map - provided
that you have the Panoramascope installed, of course - and the next version of the
Panoramascope will include the option to go back the other way.
- 28th February 2009
- The data from NASA that the Panoramascope uses is generally excellent, but it
does have a few problems; in particular some mountain areas have gaps where the NASA
radar failed to penetrate due to shadow effects or heavy cloud. The Panoramascope
makes a crude attempt to fill these gaps with straight lines between the known
points.
- Now, however, many of these gaps have been eliminated due to new data from Jonathan de Ferranti.
Jonathan has used maps to fill in the gaps in NASA data, and most of his work is now
available on the Panoramascope. Specifically, there is now improved data for the
Alps, Himalaya, Andes, New Zealand and a few areas of Scotland and Africa.
- You don't need a new version of the Panoramascope app to get the improved
data, however you do need to delete any existing terrain data for the affected areas
using the "Delete cached terrain data" option. There's no need to do this if you've
never looked at views in the affected areas.
- Jonathan also has data for Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland and the Antarctic
peninsular; these areas are not covered at all by the NASA data. I plan to make
this data available soon, but it may need a change to the app.
- 26th February 2009
- One of the problems with the App Store is that it's not possible to read reviews
written by people outside your own country. So even as a developer I don't know what
people are saying about my app. Until, that is, I found this perl script by Erica Sadun
that sends fake requests to retrieve all reviews: Scraping
AppStore Reviews. So I now know that someone in New Zealand calling themselves
"Hazlitt" has written the following:
- "Damn, what a waste of money! Why do they sell apps on the NZ Store that are
not compatible for NZ??!! Now how do I get my money back??"
- The app store also has no way for me to reply to reviews like this except
by posting here on my own site. So let me do that. First of all, the Panoramascope
certainly will display views of New Zealand; here is a view of one of the country's
most picturesque areas, Milford Sound:
- So presumably this user has some other problem that has prevented it from working.
Some users in the U.S. had a problem with their mobile network that I fixed in version
1.0.1; maybe it's something similar. But with this one-directional communication method
I'll probably never know.
- As for "how do I get my money back?", well the answer is certainly not by posting a
review that I would never have been able to read until I found this script! "Hazlitt", if
by any chance you read this, the correct way to get you money back is to contact me by
email - see the "Contact Us" link at the top of this page. Apple's policy is "all sales
are final, no refunds" but I don't consider that reasonable (and I'm surprised that its
legality has not been challenged in Europe under the distance selling regulations). I want
users to be satisfied with their purchases. If you are not satisfied, get in touch.
- 13th February 2009
- Version 1.0.2 is now be available. This fixes a bug that had
made it impossible for iPhone users to choose between the camera and
their photo library; now, you should be offered a choice after you
touch the camera icon.
- 28th January 2009
- Version 1.0.1 should now be available. If you have had trouble with
mobile networking in version 1.0, please upgrade and let me know if this fixes it.
- 24th January 2009
- I've just submitted a new version that will hopefully fix the networking
problem mentioned below. My guess is that it will take a few days to get through the
Apple review process so you'll be able to try it out later in the week. Sorry for
the inconvenience.
- 23rd January 2009
- I've heard that at least one user has had problems using the Panoramascope from his
AT&T U.S. 3G network. I think that this is probably something to do with their use of
HTTP proxy servers and my use of a custom HTTP client rather than the built-in Apple one.
So it looks like I'll have to roll out a version 1.0.1 and see if it fixes it.
- Unfortunately I wasn't able to tour the world pre-launch checking that it worked with
every 3G network so I'm afraid glitches like this are inevitable. But hopefully I'll be able
to fix it soon. If you're getting "Download Error" or "unable to download required terrain data"
messages, please let me know. Sorry for the inconvenience.
- 15th January 2009
- The Panoramascope is finally ready! Hooray!
- It's taken a while to get to this stage. The idea first came to me last Summer when I was
hiking in the Canadian Rockies. There were some great views but most of the mountains were so far
away that they were off my map - and I probably wouldn't have been able to identify them from a
contour map anyway. "If only there were some sort of gadget...", I thought to myself. A few
weeks later I had a prototype running on a lashed-together laptop and webcam. Field testing in
the English Lake District proved that it worked, but it needed to run on more compact
hardware. Like the iPhone...
- I do hope that people have as much fun using the Panoramascope as I have had building it.
I think it should appeal to hikers but also to anyone who looks at a view and wonders "what is
that lump over there?". I've also found that simply browsing the world's best views is a great
way of re-living old trips and potential future ones.
- Thanks for your interest - Phil