Post your pics, videos and vlogs here
#1889677
A couple of years ago I had a thought: Why not take the idea of Google Street View's ground-level 360-degree photos, and lift it up into the air?

Two years later, the result is my new website:

https://wingvista.org

Screenshots:
Image
Image
Image
Image


Description:
To create it, I attached a Samsung Gear 360 camera to my group aircraft, and got it to take a geo-tagged photo every 30 seconds or so in flight. Then using this data I plotted the aircraft's tracks onto an online map, with each point where a photo was taken being clickable to display the photo in a 360-degree embedded photo viewer.

I've recorded most of my flights of the past two years, collecting over 4000 photos (39Gb) over around 20 hours all across the south east of the UK, including Bristol, the outskirts of London, the Kent coastline, the covid-deactivated Solent CTR, and my best one - the north to south transit of Gatwick I was lucky enough to get in June last year.

While it is something I started fairly casually, it has turned into a rather absorbing hobby, and I've probably spent far more time on it than I should have given that it is has to be a non-profit thing (as I fly on a microlight NPPL).

I believe I've been compliant with air law for these (500 foot rule etc), but if you think I haven't do let me know.

I'm now looking to add more tracks. I'd be interested, therefore, in attaching the camera onto other aircraft, particularly any that have the capability to fly to places I can't (such as inside London's Class D, above 10,000 feet, or overseas). The only impediment is that you generally have to get a "change" signed off by an aircraft inspector to attach the camera, and you have to have a suitable mount to do this (I use one I bought from the US).

Let me know what you think, and also if you can think of any additional features that could be of interest.


Technical details:
Camera:
Samsung Gear 360 (2017 version only): £349
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M4J53CO

Mount:
US $179.99. Tripod-compatible mount, with go-pro adaptor (unused). Attached to port strut. Signed off by our group's aircraft inspector as per LAA rules.
https://flightflix.net/product/rock-ste ... skid-base/
(purchased in the end through Amazon).

Images captured using Google's Street View free Smartphone app (provided ostensibly to let you generate footage for Google Street View) running on a Samsung A40 mobile phone inside the cockpit. Configured to capture a photo every 30 seconds or so with geotagging, saving onto the phone's memory card over a Wifi connection.

A second phone (my personal phone) running a GPS tracking app as a backup in case the main camera's one fails. Also provides GPS altitude data.

Website written in nodejs.org and some very basic html in notepad++
Free map data from openstreetmap.org .png tiles generated from a temporary openstreetmap tile server I created, then hosted independently.
Flight tracks rendered with openlayers.org
360 photos rendered full screen using pannellum.org online viewer software, with a python script used to generate multiple files for "multiresolution" fast loading functionality.
Flight tracks processed, time-lag errors corrected, and flight parameters calculated (heading, groundspeed, rate of ascent), using Microsoft SQL Server.
Website hosted on Amazon AWS S3 with Cloudfront (for https).

My day job is a database computer programmer, so that gave me a head start to some aspects of the technical development. But the remainder I've had to learn from scratch (mainly by googling).

Runs best on a desktop or laptop, but it does work on a mobile device.


Bugs:
1. Sometimes you lose the "3-Way Toggle" button when you click on an image. If this happens just click F5 to refresh the page to go back to the map view.
Last edited by neil9327 on Thu Dec 23, 2021 8:32 pm, edited 7 times in total.
UncleT, StratoTramp, Dodo and 2 others liked this
#1890297
Dodo wrote:It's fantastic. Well done.


Thanks :)

Here's another screenshot, this time from flight 6, frame 298 at 15:13:17 UTC on 30th May last year, just before the battery ran out of juice passing The Needles:
Image

First, for speed, it loads a low resolution version. Once that is loaded it downloads the finer resolution image file parts, the full details of which can only be seen (unless you have a high res monitor) when you double-click the image to zoom in:
Image

The source 360 image from which these low-res and high-res image files are generated is 8Mb, and I've uploaded it here (it takes a few seconds to download):
https://wingvista.org/WingVistaImages/t ... /6_298.jpg

and it looks like the following "equirectangular" format:
Image

before the python script mentioned earlier chops it up into several small files arranged in subdirectories on the web server:
Image