Hi, You may remember a talk I gave in SOTM Girona in 2010 on the "OpenTrailView" project. The idea of this project was to produce something similar to Google Street View but for off road routes such as footpaths. However, the procedure to contribute was long-winded, involving taking panoramic shots, stitching them together manually using third-party software, using GPS traces and timestamps to position the photos, and manually uploading them.
However as you probably know, around a year ago Google added "Photo Spheres" to the Android camera, which allows you to easily take an all-round spherical panorama on an Android phone. This is available by default on Nexus devices but can be downloaded as a separate download on other Android 4.x devices (see link below). Consequently this got me interested in resurrecting OpenTrailView. So the new version of OpenTrailView is now available at http://www.opentrailview.org. Currently you can upload and view photo spheres - you can see a few close to the default location. The aim is to use underlying OpenStreetMap data to link the photo spheres together to produce virtual tours of the countryside, kind-of like Street View but with the photo spheres more widely spaced. More details, including some info on current limitations and issues, at http://www.opentrailview.org/about.html The photo spheres are currently rather slow loading (take a few seconds to load). kennydude's photosphere javascript library has been used to embed the photo spheres. Also see the wiki page: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenTrailView which contains information on how you can set up your own OpenTrailView server. Due to server capacity constraints, the underlying OSM data only covers part of the UK, so when the functionality to link the photospheres is implemented, it will only work for those parts of the UK. So if you're interested in seeing this in your own country, you might want to set up your own copy of the server. This basically involves setting up a postgis database and then installing a local copy of the Freemap code (including opentrailview) on your own machine. (Posted to talk-gb as well as talk, as I have underlying OSM data for much of the UK on my server, so the virtual tours are likely to be working in parts of the UK before anywhere else) Nick
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