Discussion: GPS Heresy

Here is a completely crazy idea.

How about OUSA reverses tack, and designs a simple cell phone app, specifically for helping people complete an orienteering course? Sync it up with the Condes file before the course starts, using bluetooth or something. It tells you which direction your next control is, and how far away you are. It turns red when you are less than 50m away. It warns you if you overshoot. Now beginners can compete in an "aided" category, while the experts could compete "unaided".

Just think, all those repetitive hours stuck on trail, doing trivial white and yellow courses could become a thing of the past. It could be absolutely awesome for beginners.

Coolness, dude! You might just have the idea that will finally drive orienteering into a growth spurt.

Sure, it is not traditional orienteering - but so what? We will still have tradition too. But this sounds like a great way to pull in geocachers, urban adventureers and other questors who are intimidated by our complex maps.

Here is your target market.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/travel-news...

No objection from me. And the whole route choice element is still preserved. Although I can easily see this spawning a whole new kind of complaint when you have people bitching that there are distortions in the map that make the GPS be off (or the reception is bad in some part of the map, or...)

Many similar App's already exist. As but one example, Angelica, Vadim & I recently won street O' organized by Lavahound. http://www.lavahound.com/running.html

And while competing in the Street-O (or whatever you call it), I was wishing for one thing only - give me a real map (even Google Maps would work) and I can crash the course. Well, we crashed the course anyway.

We're useless at the marketing but working on the product side. www.mapsport.co.nz/hvoc/permcourse.html#pmax

As Wyatt says there are already many apps out there that would work for this. I´ve tried an app called OruxMaps and georeferenced my nearest to home O-map into it.

Following earlier AP discussions some time ago I planned to try navigating by a combination of GPS and this map, but still haven´t gotten around to do it... Maybe it´s time for another go?

Were you able to georeference the map quickly, from a picture taken with the phone camera? That's the part that I think is missing. What I imagine would work best is something that lets you take a picture at the start, and indicate where you are on the map (triangle) and align the map to magnetic north. Then it would let you set the scale by indicating two north lines that are a known distance apart. At that point, you'll be at least roughly aligned, but periodically as you run (perhaps at each control), you can indicate your position again, and the app will refine the map alignment. Biggins, wanna create this?

Geocaching with a redundant map!

jjcote>> No, georeferencing for this particular app was a rather complicated matter done with a scanned jpg-image. So for cheating this wouldn´t be good enough :(