The Freemap blog, revisited

Hi, please note that Freemap may be down from time to time this weekend as I’m aiming to do a distribution upgrade. So please bear with me if the server isn’t available continuously this weekend!

Would like to announce the initial version of “OpenTrail”, an Android app for walkers and hikers. At the moment it’s pretty basic but I thought I’d announce the initial release in case people are interested in following the project. For the moment you can view “slippy maps” on your Android phone from the following sources:
* Freemap
* OSM Cycle Map
* OS out-of-copyright maps: NPE, 7th Series, or First Edition.
Like Walknotes (see my previous post) you can also create and upload notes while you’re out walking (points of interest, path problems, etc) and upload them to Freemap where they will appear as annotations on the main Freemap maps.

You can see a screenshot here, running on the Android emulator:

and it’s available from here (APK needs Android 2.1+) or via SVN from svn://free-map.org.uk/svn/freemap (please contact me on nick_whitelegg at yahoo dot co dot uk if you want an account). It makes use of the osmdroid library. As my focus of interest in mobile development has now shifted to Android, it supersedes a couple of earlier projects: the old Java ME client FreemapMobile, and footnav, aimed at a Qt-based environment.

As I said it’s pretty basic at the moment but I do want to take it a lot further. I’m partially aiming at producing something a bit like MemoryMap but open source and using OSM data, but I’m particularly interested in experimenting with augmented reality for walkers. There have been quite a few experiments with augmented reality on city points of interest and the like, some with OSM data, but little apparent exploitation of the technology for outdoor navigation. I believe it should be theoretically possible to overlay OSM data on the feed from a smartphone camera, opening up some potentially very exciting possibilities for in the field navigation, particularly if height data is thrown into the equation, and particularly with the OS LandForm Panorama data available for the UK, which is higher accuracy than SRTM, Anyway, that’s what I’ll be working on next, and what I’d really like to do, with any luck, is have it ready to actually use for navigation while on holiday in Colorado and/or Austria this summer. But we shall see…