OpenTrailView – open source 360 panoramas for walking trails

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hi,

I’m not sure whether this forum is an appropriate place to make people aware of my 360 panorama project, apologies if not.

I am (WARNING – at very early stages, please do not expect a polished and professional looking site) developing ‘OpenTrailView’, a site which allows users to share 360 panoramas of walking trails in a similar manner to StreetView. I started developing this a good few years ago (using a version which required manual stitching of regular photos) but have resumed recently due to the increased interest in 360 photography in recent years.

The key thing about this project is that it is focusing purely on 360 and purely on walking trails/nature – and is 100% free and open source. It is closely aligned with OpenStreetMap, though not an official OpenStreetMap project; panos are auto-connected into tours using underlying OpenStreetMap path data.

It’s available at https://opentrailview.org, and if you’re a developer, source code is at https://gitlab.com/nickw1/opentrailview.git.

There are perhaps 500 panoramas on there already, mostly in Southern England in two of the national parks.

Anyway, just mentioning it in case anyone is interested and has 360 photography of hiking trails that they would be interested in contributing. I particularly welcome contributions from Europe and Turkey, as the panorama auto-connection feature will work in those areas; my hosting cannot deal with the whole world just yet. Would be good also to hear of any other 360 panorama forums (e.g. focusing on off-road trails and open-source) that would gain potential interest.

Thanks,
Nick

[Franz Villa]

Hey Nick! Love your project idea. Thanks for sharing it here. You definitely have a challenge ahead of you, as it’s thus far a road, or rather trail, less travelled by 360 photographers. Developing the UX tech behind the creative may be the most demanding obstacle. And when it works, perhaps your project will help bring the beauty of the world’s many hiking trails to mobile devices and computers everywhere. Blaze that trail Nick. I am doing something similar but on a much smaller scale. Here’s to the journey!

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