I thought that this looked familiar. I used it when setting up an ADSB receiver to show the expected "visible" range from my house.
HeyWhatsThat
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#22Related, but does anyone know of an app or site that can tell you what you're facing when you're standing on a beach? As in, what country or part of the country - so if you were standing on a Croatian beach somewhere and pointed it east, you could find out what part of Italy you're looking at.
I've always thought it would be cool to stand on a coast of Malta and tell if I'm facing Libya, Israel, or Greece.
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#23> At HeyWhatsThat -- Russia? we tell you where in Alaska you can see Russia. Man. Remember when saying something like that was enough to disqualify you from the presidency?
Simpler times
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#24The (pun ahead) peak of this method imho is implemented in "PeakFinder", afaik uses a low res nation wide (switzerland) height map, after initial gps fix it downloads local high res height map, calculates peak contours based of current location AND height and overlays that grid including the peak names onto the camera feed using the gyro and compass. It's quite easy to build accurate geo-related applications in Switz…
PeakFinder works worldwide, not just in Switzerland.
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#25Tangentially, are there any good map websites out there that show me the elevation at a point I click on? I've found a lot of providers lacking in this department, even if they clearly have height data for showing contours/3d views.
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#26Related, but does anyone know of an app or site that can tell you what you're facing when you're standing on a beach? As in, what country or part of the country - so if you were standing on a Croatian beach somewhere and pointed it east, you could find out what part of Italy you're looking at. I've always thought it would be cool to stand on a coast of Malta and tell if I'm facing Libya, Israel, or Greece.
Can't any map app do that? I mean it shows you your location on the map, and then you just scroll across the map to see what you'd be looking at, right?
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#27The (pun ahead) peak of this method imho is implemented in "PeakFinder", afaik uses a low res nation wide (switzerland) height map, after initial gps fix it downloads local high res height map, calculates peak contours based of current location AND height and overlays that grid including the peak names onto the camera feed using the gyro and compass. It's quite easy to build accurate geo-related applications in Switz…
The official Swiss Topo app has this AR feature built-in, by the way. Or at least on iOS. Pretty magical when it works, like most (real) AR applications. (It does lose alignment from time to time.)
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#28This thing is awesome. I'm curious about the algorithm used to calculate it. Given a spherical height map, I guess the naive way to solve it would be to basically cast a whole bunch of rays from your starting point and see what you hit, but I wonder if you could do something more clever.
I'm also curious about this note: "Because of refraction, the further away an object is, the higher it will appear." I kind of figured that, like a ship sailing towards the horizon, the distant thing would get shorter as it got further away. I wonder why they get higher instead. Something about big elevation differences?
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#29Interesting, but clearly ancient (refers to a Google Earth plugin, for instance). Are there more modern equivalents? I'd love to have an Android app which told me what the things were I was looking at.
It doesn't seem to request location in a modern-enough way on safari on ios. It just seems to think that it can't get the location and suggests that I go open the Maps app.
Re: HeyWhatsThat
#30Related, but does anyone know of an app or site that can tell you what you're facing when you're standing on a beach? As in, what country or part of the country - so if you were standing on a Croatian beach somewhere and pointed it east, you could find out what part of Italy you're looking at. I've always thought it would be cool to stand on a coast of Malta and tell if I'm facing Libya, Israel, or Greece.
Can't any map app do that? I mean it shows you your location on the map, and then you just scroll across the map to see what you'd be looking at, right?
Kind of - but when the country across the water is hundreds of km away, turning slightly to the left or right could mean you're facing a completely different country. But I'd also love to know which part of a country you're facing.