WW for offroad navigation?

[OffroadWW]

Hi

Off-road navigation means that people travel in remote locations or countries. There's a computer, most of the time a CarPC or a Notebook, and a GPS. It also means that most of the time no routeable vector maps are available. Instead, people use satellite images and raster maps that are often scanned paper topographical maps. Most people use one of the commercial programs TTQV, OziExplorer or Fugawi. There is no Internet connection so maps must be locally stored.

Despite the term off-road, many travelers drive responsibly on established tracks, respecting the environment.

I believe that in the near future, off-road navigation should be done with a virtual globe and with open source software! It is very beneficial to be able to tilt the map display while traveling to see the terrain in 3D. So I propose to add features to WW to make it suitable for the task:

I envision:
- A touch screen user interface suitable for low resolution monitors. Most CarPCs use monitors with a resolution as low as 800x480.
- A virtual keyboard to enter track and waypoint names with the touch screen.
- Online GPS with moving map. I think that's already available.
- Import of raster maps into the WW cache. These maps are mrSid, PNG, ECW, JPEG and proprietary formats. There are also calibration files in various formats, perhaps most importantly in the CAL format of TTQV. The import could be done off-line with a conversion tool. Or WW could be extended to accept some of these formats as an additional native cache format. Map datums vary. Some are WGS 84 but there are any number of other formats in use.
- Capture and real time display of tracks and waypoints.

I can help writing software. I have done my own open source software, see:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flowswot

Questions:
- Would these changes be acceptable for the main code base of WW? Obviously, everything would be configurable and could be disabled.
If not, I would have to fork the code base and create an application specific WW but that would be undesirable.

- Is it correct that new map formats could be added with plug-ins? I'm most interested in mrSid, ECW and PNG.

- Would it make sense to parse calibration files from other navigation programs? The benefit would be that the same set of map data could be used for WW and the traditional navigation programs.

- Is anyone interested in developing some of these features?
Touch screen based UI?
Track and waypoint capture?
Alternate formats map import or on the fly map conversion?

I appreciate all comments.

Thanks & regards

[bull]

Very nice ideas, I can't think of a reason why these things shouldn't be in the core, as long as it doesn't effect performance.

I think there was a multitouch demo with World Wind, so we are halfway there.

For offroad data simple add-ons should be enough.

Plug-ins can do pretty much anything, we were discussing some way to support geojpeg2000 today on IRC.

It's getting late here, so I need some sleep, but I'm sure others who are more awake will comment.

Edit - Oh and png is already supported.

Edit 2 - Bed soon, multitouch plug-in http://oldspeak.net/worldwind/

[OffroadWW]

Thanks for the encouragement and infos. Just wanted to say I'll be out of town for two weeks so I may not reply until then but I appreciate all comments.

Where should I try to recruit programmers to help once the requirements are more clear? Too much work for one guy.

any more word on this. ive joined up to learn about using WW for offroad. i currently use google earth but the large cache of WW is just too good to not look into making it work.

im forming my own needs that so far are only:

-some sort of ability to zoom out with a touch screen interface(on screen buttons like GE?)

-importing of google earth files. this seems to be only roughly implimeted right now. ive had zero good results other then a single waypoint with icon.

i think alot of the gps saving tracks and stuff can be handled with GPS2WORLDWIND and im happy with the images that MS Virtual Earth gives....but im not sure how all of this will come together offroad.

[virtualyan]

Off-road navigation means that people travel in remote locations or countries. There's a computer, most of the time a CarPC or a Notebook, and ..

virtual-assistants.outsourcing-services-india.com