Seeing through trees electronically
Original post
So a friend and I were doing some navigation stuff along a ridge under trees yesterday, and it crossed my mind to wonder if there are any phone-like apps out there yet which would be able to project an image of what the surrounding land would look like if trees weren't in the way. (ie. Hold up your phone straight ahead to see what the ridge and various spurs up ahead look like, as if there was a clear line of sight.)
In this day and age when devices have GPS for position, electronic compasses for direction, and accelerometers to know which way is down, there are already apps that do things like labeling things in the night sky when holding the screen up. With the availability of topo data and contours, it should be a fairly straightforward thing to do to show surrounding terrain, should it not?
Does such an app exist?
I'm saying this as somoene who's never owned this kind of device. I'm more just curious about what's out there.
I'm pretty sure the new garmins (colarado) have a 3D map. then again who needs to see the surrounding mountains there either too steep or too far to travel! Just make up what you see haha
Thanks, that's interesting to know. I was just thinking it'd be a handy kind of gadget in an off-track bush-bashing scenario. Yesterday we had to climb a couple of trees to be able to clearly confirm that there was a long-ish obvious ridge ahead that we wanted to head along. If we'd had a window that could display the view in all directions as if the trees weren't there (or clouds or white-out conditions in other scenarios, perhaps), we could've seen that clearly from where we were standing.
Not to say that you can't figure this all out with existing techniques and tools. It'd just be an interesting addition to experiment with.
That's pretty cool -- there's an example of the 3D view in the review at http://gps.about.com/od/handheldgpsreceivers/fr/garmin_colorado.htm (scroll down). I guess you'd need a specially compiled topo map that includes the elevation info about the terrain rather than just including flat contour lines for display.
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| Forum | Gear talk |
|---|---|
| Started by | izogi |
| On | 13 December 2010 |
| Replies | 3 |
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