i'm new to Swift, and now i'm trying to build sky map app like the application "star chart".
i already got a sky map image from NASA and cover it on SCNsphere, also already set camera node in the center of this sphere to make it looks like 360 degrees. Furthermore, i used accelerator to check what direction the camera is looking at.
i know that the sky map like “star chart” doesn't need internet to update data. so now the biggest problem is that i don't know how to correct the position of my sky map according to people's current time and location.
Any good advice and help? Thanks in advance!!! cause i tried vary hard to find some related information but still stuck in here for three weeks.
You just need to rotate your map with time+longitude around Earth's rotation axis and with latitude around axis longitude=90 degrees while earth is placed in the center of your sphere. For stars the offset does not matter so you can ignore Sun-Earth distance and also Earth's radius as well.
The time rotation must be day+year rotations together. On top of that you have to apply precession and nutation if you want to have higher precision.
Of coarse the stars are moving too so if you need really high precision and or high time interval to cover (hundreds or thousands of years) then this approach is not good and you should use stellar catalog with the motions implemented.
For more info see related:
How to draw sky chart
Plotting a star chart efficiently
If you want to use catalog and real colors then you will also need
Star B-V color index to apparent RGB color
simplified atmospheric scattering GLSL shader
And finally here some hints for such applications:
Is it possible to make realistic n-body solar system simulation in matter of size and mass?
Seems like a simple question, but I have been tearing my hair out for hours now.
I have a series of files ie.
kml_image_L1_0_0.jpg
kml_image_L2_0_0.jpg
kml_image_L2_0_1.jpg
kml_image_L2_1_0.jpg
kml_image_L2_1_1.jpg
etc. However just plotting them on the leaflet map surface understandibly puts the images at 0,0 on the earths surface, and the 0 zoom level inferred by the files should really be about 15 or so.
So I want to specify the latitude and longitude where the images should originate , and what zoom level they should start at. I have tried bounds (which doesn't display anything) and I have tried playing with offsetting the zoom level.
I need this because a user needs to click on an offline map to specify where they are and I need the GPS coordinates.
I also have a KML file but it seems to be of more help for plotting vector data on the map.
Any help is much appreciated, cheers.
If I understand correctly, the "kml_image_Lz_x_y.jpg" images that you have are actually tiles, with zoom, horizontal and vertical indices in their file name?
And your issue is that they use (z,x,y) numbers as if they started from the top-most level (zoom 0, single tile for entire world), but in fact they are just a small portion of the pyramid of tiles?
And you cannot use them as is because you still want to get actual geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude), which would be totally wrong if you used the tiles as if they were showing the entire world?
In that case, you have several options as workarounds:
The most simple and reliable would probably be to simply write a small script to rename all your tiles to their true (z,x,y) numbers.
Another option would be to modify the (z,x,y) numbers before they are written in the tile src attribute, and apply the appropriate offset (constant for z, scaled by z for x and y). That should probably happen in L.TileLayer.getTileUrl() method.
Good luck! :-)
Maybe I'm asking this too soon in my research, but I'd better know if this is possible sooner than later.
Imagine I have the following square printed on a paper on top of a table:
The table is brown, so it does not match with any of the colors in the square. Is there a way for me, from a common iPhone camera (non-stereo view), to figure out the distance and angle from which Im looking at the square in the table?
In the end what I'm looking for is being able to draw a 3D square on top of this one using the camera image, but I'm not sure if I am going to be able to figure out the distance and position of the object in space using only a 2D image. Any hints are well appreciated.
Short answer: http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-augmented-reality
Big answer:
First posterize, Then vectorize, With the vectors in your power you may need to do some math tricks to define, based on the vectors position, the perspective and then the camera position.
Maybe this help:
www.pixastic.com/lib/docs/actions/posterize/
github.com/selead/cl-vectorizer
vectormagic.com/home
autotrace.sourceforge.net
www.scipy.org/PyLab
raphaeljs.com/
technabob.com/blog/2007/12/29/video-games-get-vectorized/
superuser.com/questions/88415/is-there-an-open-source-alternative-to-vector-magic
Oughta be possible. Scan the image for the red/blue/yellow pattern, then do edge detection to figure out how warped the squares are (they'll be parallelograms in anything but straight-on view). Distance would depend on the camera's zoom setting and scan resolution. But basically you'd count how many pixels are visible in each of the squares, run that past the camera's specs and you should be able to determine a rough distance.
I am developing an application for iPhone.
I am using OpenGL to display a 3D object in the screen, with the camera view as background.
I'd like to know how can i change the OpenGL ES unit to centimeters/meters.
How can i do that?
You dont.
Thought experiment time!
First imagine you have sphere 1 centimeter in diameter. And you have a camera 10 centimeters away. You would see a small sphere in the center of the frame.
Now imagine you have a sphere 1 kilometer in diameter and a camera 10 kilometers away. How would you expect the image to be different?
The correct answer is you would not expect the image to change at all. All that really matters is the relative sizes of things. So the unit type you attribute to the the numbers only matters to the programmer, and not to the program.
So you simply mentally declare that one unit is equal to one centimeter and create your objects and world according to that scale. There is no code level change to make this happen. It's merely a convention that you use to help you build things in correct dimensions relative to each other.
OpenGL does not have a notion for units. It just uses unit-less values. What these values mean is up to you. They just have to be consistent. So if your objects coordinates and viewing parameters are all specified with meters in mind and you have an object whose coordinates are in centimeters, just scale that object by a factor of 0.1.
The Screen-to-world problem on the iPhone
I have a 3D model (CUBE) rendered in an EAGLView and I want to be able to detect when I am touching the center of a given face (From any orientation angle) of the cube. Sounds pretty easy but it is not...
The problem:
How do I accurately relate screen-coordinates (touch point) to world-coordinates (a location in OpenGL 3D space)? Sure, converting a given point into a 'percentage' of the screen/world-axis might seem the logical fix, but problems would arise when I need to zoom or rotate the 3D space. Note: rotating & zooming in and out of the 3D space will change the relationship of the 2D screen coords with the 3D world coords...Also, you'd have to allow for 'distance' in between the viewpoint and objects in 3D space. At first, this might seem like an 'easy task', but that changes when you actually examine the requirements. And I've found no examples of people doing this on the iPhone. How is this normally done?
An 'easy' task?:
Sure, one might undertake the task of writing an API to act as a go-between between screen and world, but the task of creating such a framework would require some serious design and would likely take 'time' to do -- NOT something that can be one-manned in 4 hours...And 4 hours happens to be my deadline.
The question:
What are some of the simplest ways to
know if I touched specific locations
in 3D space in the iPhone OpenGL ES
world?
You can now find gluUnProject in http://code.google.com/p/iphone-glu/. I've no association with the iphone-glu project and haven't tried it yet myself, just wanted to share the link.
How would you use such a function? This PDF mentions that:
The Utility Library routine gluUnProject() performs this reversal of the transformations. Given the three-dimensional window coordinates for a location and all the transformations that affected them, gluUnProject() returns the world coordinates from where it originated.
int gluUnProject(GLdouble winx, GLdouble winy, GLdouble winz,
const GLdouble modelMatrix[16], const GLdouble projMatrix[16],
const GLint viewport[4], GLdouble *objx, GLdouble *objy, GLdouble *objz);
Map the specified window coordinates (winx, winy, winz) into object coordinates, using transformations defined by a modelview matrix (modelMatrix), projection matrix (projMatrix), and viewport (viewport). The resulting object coordinates are returned in objx, objy, and objz. The function returns GL_TRUE, indicating success, or GL_FALSE, indicating failure (such as an noninvertible matrix). This operation does not attempt to clip the coordinates to the viewport or eliminate depth values that fall outside of glDepthRange().
There are inherent difficulties in trying to reverse the transformation process. A two-dimensional screen location could have originated from anywhere on an entire line in three-dimensional space. To disambiguate the result, gluUnProject() requires that a window depth coordinate (winz) be provided and that winz be specified in terms of glDepthRange(). For the default values of glDepthRange(), winz at 0.0 will request the world coordinates of the transformed point at the near clipping plane, while winz at 1.0 will request the point at the far clipping plane.
Example 3-8 (again, see the PDF) demonstrates gluUnProject() by reading the mouse position and determining the three-dimensional points at the near and far clipping planes from which it was transformed. The computed world coordinates are printed to standard output, but the rendered window itself is just black.
In terms of performance, I found this quickly via Google as an example of what you might not want to do using gluUnProject, with a link to what might lead to a better alternative. I have absolutely no idea how applicable it is to the iPhone, as I'm still a newb with OpenGL ES. Ask me again in a month. ;-)
You need to have the opengl projection and modelview matrices. Multiply them to gain the modelview projection matrix. Invert this matrix to get a matrix that transforms clip space coordinates into world coordinates. Transform your touch point so it corresponds to clip coordinates: the center of the screen should be zero, while the edges should be +1/-1 for X and Y respectively.
construct two points, one at (0,0,0) and one at (touch_x,touch_y,-1) and transform both by the inverse modelview projection matrix.
Do the inverse of a perspective divide.
You should get two points describing a line from the center of the camera into "the far distance" (the farplane).
Do picking based on simplified bounding boxes of your models. You should be able to find ray/box intersection algorithms aplenty on the web.
Another solution is to paint each of the models in a slightly different color into an offscreen buffer and reading the color at the touch point from there, telling you which brich was touched.
Here's source for a cursor I wrote for a little project using bullet physics:
float x=((float)mpos.x/screensize.x)*2.0f -1.0f;
float y=((float)mpos.y/screensize.y)*-2.0f +1.0f;
p2=renderer->camera.unProject(vec4(x,y,1.0f,1));
p2/=p2.w;
vec4 pos=activecam.GetView().col_t;
p1=pos+(((vec3)p2 - (vec3)pos) / 2048.0f * 0.1f);
p1.w=1.0f;
btCollisionWorld::ClosestRayResultCallback rayCallback(btVector3(p1.x,p1.y,p1.z),btVector3(p2.x,p2.y,p2.z));
game.dynamicsWorld->rayTest(btVector3(p1.x,p1.y,p1.z),btVector3(p2.x,p2.y,p2.z), rayCallback);
if (rayCallback.hasHit())
{
btRigidBody* body = btRigidBody::upcast(rayCallback.m_collisionObject);
if(body==game.worldBody)
{
renderer->setHighlight(0);
}
else if (body)
{
Entity* ent=(Entity*)body->getUserPointer();
if(ent)
{
renderer->setHighlight(dynamic_cast<ModelEntity*>(ent));
//cerr<<"hit ";
//cerr<<ent->getName()<<endl;
}
}
}
Imagine a line that extends from the viewer's eye
through the screen touch point into your 3D model space.
If that line intersects any of the cube's faces, then the user has touched the cube.
Two solutions present themselves. Both of them should achieve the end goal, albeit by a different means: rather than answering "what world coordinate is under the mouse?", they answer the question "what object is rendered under the mouse?".
One is to draw a simplified version of your model to an off-screen buffer, rendering the center of each face using a distinct color (and adjusting the lighting so color is preserved identically). You can then detect those colors in the buffer (e.g. pixmap), and map mouse locations to them.
The other is to use OpenGL picking. There's a decent-looking tutorial here. The basic idea is to put OpenGL in select mode, restrict the viewport to a small (perhaps 3x3 or 5x5) window around the point of interest, and then render the scene (or a simplified version of it) using OpenGL "names" (integer identifiers) to identify the components making up each face. At the end of this process, OpenGL can give you a list of the names that were rendered in the selection viewport. Mapping these identifiers back to original objects will let you determine what object is under the mouse cursor.
Google for opengl screen to world (for example there’s a thread where somebody wants to do exactly what you are looking for on GameDev.net). There is a gluUnProject function that does precisely this, but it’s not available on iPhone, so that you have to port it (see this source from the Mesa project). Or maybe there’s already some publicly available source somewhere?