Thursday, January 5, 2012

Geopaparazzi gets to know Mixare

It is now a long time I said I would have tried that. Finally I found the time to code that minipart that would make Geopaparazzi with one project that really interests me: Mixare.

I have always been interested in Augmented Reality. My thought is that on low cost devices it is something more entertaining than really useful for job/engineering/surveying purposes. But many times start as a joke and get great with the time, right?

Anyways, Mixare has a simple approach (actually more than one), which bases on the consuming of a json file with the info to show in the augmented world. After that one intent calls the app itself and takes care of the rest.

Quite easy, yes, kudos to the Mixare team (we live at about 30Km distance from each other, it was about time to try that out :) ).

So in the next release of geopaparazzi we will have one more feature, which the possibility to load the data currently visible in the map's viewport through the new "view in mixare" option (note the bookmarks stars):


Geopaparazzi does nothing more than formatting the point data available in the current viewport of the map and feed them to mixare:


The gps position from which this screen was taken is the white/blue dot in the lower right angle of the first image. Obviously the elevation of the thing is not precise, since the bookmarks are placed at a 0 level in geopaparazzi. But geonote have an elevation info and will be a bit better (even if by no means precise). And the direction if definitely ok to be used for low-precision purposes.

Anyways, nice it worked out of the box. Enjoy!

2 comments:

Pedro Mendes said...

That's a really great addition to Geopaparazzi!

I've Geopaparazzi installed in my Android device for demo purposes, and I'm not familiar with the menus in the first screenshot... is that a different version of GeoPaparazzi for Andriod tablets?

moovida said...

Hi Pedro, thanks. No, the versions are the same, the current market version of Geopap doesn't have that menu. It was added today.
I am about to release this version, we are just finishing to test the Openstreemap tools that have been added. Should be a matter of days now to release version 2.6.