zbycz
Idea: Handpicked views for landmarks
I think it would be pretty sweet if we could somehow show users a pre-determined view of famous landmarks.
Big Ben as an example.
This is good for tall structures especially since they stick up into the camera in quite an ugly fashion when you zoom into them, and structures that are often seen from the same angle.
I'm not familiar with what methods are available relating to the camera position the viewport of the map, but would be cool if we could manually set it when a certain node is visited.
Potential issue: may be good to disable the effect when map layers without 3D buildings are selected
Ooooh. I thought you were suggesting embedding high-res 3D models inside the map (like google does).. but you are just suggesting a proper view.
Well, this is much easier idea :) and also we can leverage the main power of OpenStreetMap. Anyone can add any tag they think is useful. That means we can start adding tag like default_camera with values zoom;bearing;pitch see here. Than it is a oneliner in osmapp code.
Yes that sounds awesome! I will look into whether OSM already has a structure for this kind of thing!
There is a standard for tagging proposals, but afaik it is perfectly fine to start first and propose later. If need be a bulk edit solves it fine.
It would be good to discuss ideas in tagging mail list, but it's better to have a few working links first.
camera: tag is used for actual cameras in the world.
I wonder if we should make a tag like "osmapp:camera". The problem with that is if we ever did a name change we would have to update the tags, or they would have the old name.
May be better to come up with soemthing that everyone can use like:
- camera_view: pitch, bearing, zoom
- view_pitch: pitch, view_bearing: bearing, view_zoom: zoom
May be better to keep it as 3 separate tags so that we don't always have to use all 3, some objects may just need a zoom and pitch for example.
The other consideration here separate from tags is that some users may not be familiar with the pitch and heading functionality, we should either snap back to top view when they leave the location or provide a button to reset view.
Also relating to that, going to go off on a tangent here... what if we made some kind of feature where when you go to one of these landmarks a UI element shows up with extended info about it? Maybe history or other similar things.
Someone in Discord:
It's better to create this sort of metadata on a local copy of the OSM data. OSM is supposed to describe the real world, not to accommodate specific apps.
I guess it would be better to maintain the data ourselves. Luckily there are not that many famous landmarks so it doesn't sound too unrealistic to just have static data.
We could make a developer button to copy the viewports current transform values to clipboard to make it easier 😂
Well, there is a lot of metadata tags which are not directly describing the physical world (eg. image, wikipedia, year_of_construction). I think OSM is also supposed to store general metadata about the POI, and "common camera angle" could be very usefull for all the apps which decide to implement it.
I completely agree, that calling it osmapp_camera would be wrong, but sth like camera_angle should be useful. Json file in the project is also fine for start, but i would prefer to have it in different repository.
btw, now i think of it, wouldn't it be enough to always use eg. pitch=45° and bearing=-45°?
Pitch could probably always be the same, Bearing would be different for each one. Take the Big Ben example, it has one side that is not blocked by any other buildings, and its almost always photographed from that angle.
I think both methods are suitable, tags or JSON. Using tags would of course be great.
I doubt that this kind of information is a good fit for the main OpenStreetMap database, as it still can be subjective. OSM is - I believe - more about objective and factual information.
Some self-promotion:
I could imagine to include such a view-data into the OpenPlaceGuide directory datastructure
The idea of the project is to augment the OSM data with additional information, which does not really belong into the OSM database.
Of course also a dedicated database / JSON file only for such view data is possible.
Thanks for the link. I looked around the files on github, but I still don't understand what exactly does it do 🙈
Could you please describe it more? where to start, some examples, live deploy, apis etc.. ? thx
Considering that this project is already open source, just using json might not be the worst idea... Since the data is so subjective and specific to this use case.
Thanks for the link. I looked around the files on github, but I still don't understand what exactly does it do 🙈 Could you please describe it more? where to start, some examples, live deploy, apis etc.. ? thx
sorry, not yet on production, still an early phase. The rough idea is described here: https://github.com/OpenPlaceGuide/openplaceguide
I see, yeah the description makes sense. I remember it was one of the criticisms of OSM, that businesses change very fast, but it doesn't (shouldn't) have to be all persisted in osm db. Nevermind that it has ephemeral id's and node could be deleted in favour of way with no continuity. Fingers crossed with your project 🤞