528886 - Firefox and Fennec should support geographically augmented reality as a web application

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Device Interfaces, enhancement)

Description

[Sergey Sokoloff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5

"Geographically augmented reality" is created when an application takes the video camera input (which is the reality), then augments (overlays) it with some layers of markers and descriptions taken from GIS database(s). The application takes the position and rotation and tilt and azimuth of the camera into account when it renders the geolayers over video.

An example of such an application is Layar Reality Browser, see http://layar.com/

However, almost the same set of functions could be made uniformly available, inside the browser, for any Web site (Web application) that needs them.

Geographically augmented reality = geolocation + accelerometer + digital compass + camera input (+ Internet access to the geodatabase).

Geolocation support is readily available.

Accelerometer support is here since bug 485943.

Camera input is probably something that bug 451674 and bug 507749 would provide when fixed. Note that geographically augmented reality does not need to capture frames or video streams from the camera (though other types of augmented reality probably do, when they use visual keys and glues in order to attach descriptions and elements to them): geographically augmented reality just needs to display the raw video input on the page (like <video>, but local) and to be able to draw on top of it (i.e. place elements of higher z-index above the <camera>).

And I see (right now) no bugs dedicated to support of digital compass. It's probably time now to add the digital compass to DOM, because it was told at http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/on-mobile-phones-firefoxs-big-bet-is-nokia-android/ that Firefox or Fennec is going to be ported to Android devices (some of which have digital compasses).

Reproducible: Always




This feature request has a metabug nature.

Comment 1

[Sergey Sokoloff]

Some examples of free Android applications of geographically augmented reality that could as well be websites:

Google Sky Map: http://www.android.com/market/free.html#app=skymap

Wikitude - Mobile Global Travel Guide: http://www.android.com/market/free.html#app=wikitude

Comment 2

[Kyle Machulis [:qdot] [:kmachulis] (INACTIVE)]

This is now at least possible via standardized APIs, and is not really valid as a browser bug anymore.