Nick Whitelegg

Hikar is an OSM-based augmented reality navigation app for walkers and hikers, showing OSM ways overlaid on the camera feed of the device and, in the latest version, virtual signposts pointing the way to nearby points of interest. This technical talk will introduce Hikar, detail the many new developments since it was last presented at SOTM Birmingham 2013, and describe how it works in technical detail.

Augmented reality (AR) has gained a great deal of media attention in recent years, helped in no small measure by the massive mainstream success of Pokemon Go. However, AR has a great deal of potential for real-world applications too, particularly for outdoor users, which has only partly been realised to date. A number of geospatial AR apps have been available for some years, including Layar and Wikitude, primarily focusing on points of interest (POIs), but many are proprietary and closed-source. One potential but little-explored application of AR is to provide navigation tools for hikers and other outdoor users, by overlaying paths and hiking trails on the camera feed of the device. An early version of the app discussed here, Hikar, was presented at SOTM Birmingham 2013, with the footpaths and trails sourced from OSM; however this version was difficult to use and was restricted in coverage to England and Wales. After a hiatus, development on Hikar has restarted in the past year, partly inspired by increased mainstream interest in AR and helped a great deal by the availability of global Terrarium elevation tiles and increasingly-affordable web hosting. The app (available on Google Play) now covers the whole of Europe and shows not only OSM ways but also virtual signposts, showing the distance and direction to nearby OSM POIs at path junctions, helping people navigate in the field. Virtual signposts support Greek and Cyrillic as well as Roman alphabets. The talk will include an in-depth technical discussion on how the virtual signposts feature has been implemented. Problems and issues with the app as it stands (such as the realism of the path and signpost placement, and inaccuracies with GPS and mapping data) will be discussed, along with strategies for resolving those problems, and future work (which may have already started by SOTM) will be outlined, including the use of computer vision and surface detection to more accurately place the virtual data within the real world.

OpenTrailView is a project to create a StreetView-like application by walkers with contributors providing stitched 360-degree panoramas of locations on hiking trails. First discussed at State Of the Map Girona 2010, the project has been dormant for several years due to the high barrier of entry; at the time contributors had to manually stitch photos to produce a panorama using third-party stitching software. The recent availability of 360-degree cameras with auto-stitching has revived the author's interest in the project. This lightning talk will give technical details of the new version of OTV and outline initial work.

Google StreetView has for many years provided users with panoramic street views of much of the world. However Google only provide limited coverage of off-road areas and in any case, neither the system nor the panoramas themselves are Free or Open. In 2010, the author developed an initial version of OpenTrailView (OTV), a system designed to produce a StreetView-like experience for outdoor users, giving users an immersive preview of countryside areas before they visit them. The system attracted a fair amount of interest at the State Of The Map conference in Girona that year, however the need for users to manually stitch photos to produce panoramas meant the system had a high barrier to entry.

In 2013 a new version supported PhotoSpheres from Android devices, though this again gained limited contributor interest due to supporting that format only. Recently, however, 360 degree cameras have become mainstream, some of which perform auto-stitching of panoramas on the device. Thus, due to the potential lower barrier of entry to contributors, the author's interest in the project has been revived and it is proposed to restart work on the project. This lightning talk will give a technical overview of the new version of OTV and detail initial work and future plans. (Note that by the time of FOSDEM it is unlikely that there will be a fully working version, just an initial demo)

In recent years, augmented reality (AR) has gained a good deal of mainstream interest, particularly with the advent of Pokemon Go. Of great potential interest is the use of AR for outdoor users such as walkers. This talk will describe the new version of Hikar, a GPL AR Android app in development which helps outdoor users navigate by overlaying footpaths from OpenStreetMap on the camera feed, and by generating virtual signposts showing the direction and distance to nearby points of interest. The talk will describe Hikar in technical detail and challenges faced during its development, and will also invite discussion and possible collaboration on developing a completely open-source solution to geographical AR, as an alternative to ARCore or ARKit.

Augmented reality (AR) has gained a great deal of media attention in recent years, helped in no small measure by the massive mainstream success of Pokemon Go. However, AR has a great deal of potential for real-world applications too, particularly for outdoor users, which has only partly been realised.

A number of geospatial AR apps have been available for some years, including Layar and Wikitude, primarily focusing on points of interest (POIs), buy many are proprietary and closed-source. One potential use of AR, little explored as-yet, is to provide navigation tools for hikers and other outdoor users, by overlaying paths and hiking trails on the camera feed of the device. An early version of the app under discussion, Hikar, was presented at the OpenStreetMap (OSM) "State of the Map" conference in 2013, with the footpaths and trails sourced from OSM, and the latest version, detailed below, has been presented at an emerging technologies event in Northern Ireland (Digital NMD, digitalnmd.org).

After a hiatus, development on Hikar has restarted in the past year, partly inspired by increased mainstream interest in AR. The app is now capable of generating virtual signposts, showing the distance and direction to nearby POIs at path junctions, helping people navigate in the field (examples will be shown in the 'Files' section when available). The talk will include an in-depth technical discussion on how the virtual signposts feature has been implemented.

The Hikar app itself is only one possible application of AR to outdoor use. While Google and Apple have recently made available their ARCore and ARKit frameworks, with impressive results, these are not open-source and (certainly in the case of ARCore) are restricted to certain higher-end devices. There is thus a need for a completely free and open-source framework aimed at outdoor, geographic AR. The presentation will invite discussion and seek collaboration on developing such a framework, which could for example use OpenCV to detect surfaces and therefore more realistically place objects in the same way that ARCore can.

Currently Hikar is restricted in coverage to Britain, Ireland and Greece. This is, however, solely due to the database on the server only containing data for those areas; it is capable of working internationally provided servers are available to provide path and elevation data (work is underway to support the XYZ tile format), has been tested in Greece, and the virtual signposts support Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.The talk will outline how interested parties can setup a Hikar server to cover their country or region of Europe and indeed other parts of the world.

Problems and issues with the app as it stands (such as the realism of the path and signpost placement, and inaccuracies with GPS and mapping data) will be discussed, along with strategies for resolving those problems.