iOS - Center position of two coordinates - iphone

I would like to create a MKCoordinateRegion (to zoom to the good region on the map) from the northeast and southwest points given by Google. For that I need to compute the coordinate of the center between these two coordinates. Any clue? I could do simple math but I will have problems with the equator...
Thanks!!!

Assuming you mean anti-meridian and not the equator then here goes (While all this works on a flattened map and should be good enough for your purpose, it's completely bung on a sphere. see note at the bottom).
What I've done in other cases is start at either point, and if the next point is more than 180 degrees to the east, I convert it so that it is less than 180 to the west like so
if(pointa.lon - pointb.lon > 180)
pointb.lon += 360:
else if (pointa.lon - pointb.lon < -180)
pointb.lon -= 360
At this time pointb.lon might be an invalid longitude like 190 but you can at least work out the mid-point between pointa and point b because they will be on a continuous scale, so you might have points 175 and 190. Then just get the mid-point between them as 182.5, then convert that to make sure it is within the usual limits and you get -177.5 as the latitude between the two points. Working out the latitude is easy.
Of course on a sphere this is wrong because the midpoint between (-180,89) and (180,89) is (0*,90) not (0,89).
* = could be anything

Also, couldn't you just zoomToRect made with the defined corners? It'd save you doing this calculation and then next one which would be to work out what zoom level you need to be at when centered on that point to include the two corners you know about. Since the Maps app doesn't appear to scroll over the anti-meridian I assume MKMapview can't either so your rectangle is going to have to have the northeast coord as the top right and the southwest as the bottom left.

This SO post has the code to zoom a map view to fit all its annotations.

Related

Arkit corelocation Altitude (y, Height)

playing around with ARkit for the first time to place real world objects. getting the objects to go in at x,z (log/lat) seems to work ok but struggling with y (height) of objects. anyone got any example of height data being used?
any examples would help
y-axis in the positive will make the node go upwards (units in metres).
so if I want to position my node.... 1 metre in front of the camera and 10 metres high. You would set the position of the node below.
SCNVector3(x:float, y:float, z:float)
node.position = SCNVector3(0,10,-1)
Altitude is above sea level in meters. So if your location has altitude of 170m and you want your object to be floating in 10m, then you want to put altitude of 180.

Angle to Mecca from current location with iPhone compass

I have a question about the Qibla direction, I am building an iPhone application which will show both North direction and Qibla direction, I am showing the north direction with the help of CLLocationManager and updating it with CLHeading as newHeading.magneticHeading, And i am showing the Qibla direction with the following code
double A = MECCA_LONGITUDE - lon;
double b = 90.0 - lat;
double c = 90.0 - MECCA_LATITUDE;
NSLog(#"tan -1( sin(%f) / ( sin(%f) * cot(%f) - cos(%f) * cos(%f)))", A, b, c, b, A);
double qibAngle = atan(sin(A) /( sin(b) * (1 / tan(c)) - cos(b) * cos(A) ));
NSLog(#"qib Angle- %f",qibAngle);
qibla.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(qibAngle * M_PI /180);
So, here i am getting the angle, but it does not update the angle when i rotate the device, Can anyone help me out, i know that i need to do some thing with heading , but i don't know what to do?
I assume the code you posted computes the angle between geographical north and the direction towards Mecca for the current location. All you need to do now is take into account the user's heading.
For example, suppose the user is located so Mecca is directly due West, and the user is facing directly due East. Since tan returns +/-90 degrees, the qibla angle would have to be -90 degrees. Now the adjustment should be obvious: you need to subtract 90 degrees from the qibla angle respective to geographical north (-90) to arrive at (-180) degrees, which is how much user needs to turn in order to face Mecca.
Simply put, you need to "undo" the user's deviation, and you do this by subtracting from the qibla angle the the user's heading, which is relative to geographical north.
With the maths out of the way, now you need to observe heading changes and recompute the qibla angle when the heading changes. Lastly, make sure to use the trueHeading property.
I'm probably going to lose points on this answer because I know absolutely nothing about ios, but, I believe atan returns a value in radians, and CGAffineTransformMakeRotation takes it's argument in radians as well , so the conversion qibAngle * M_PI /180 is not needed.
You might also want to re-title your post, since most people have no idea what Qibla is and wouldn't realize that it's about math and iOS. I only looked because I've heard calculating the right direction to Mecca is kind of a neat math problem.

Converting tile coordinates to pixels to geographic coordinates

There are a lot of similar questions on the web but none of which deals with iOS.
If you have 16 tiles(0,0),(0,1),(0,2),(1,0),(1,1) etc at zoom level 2 (4^N) and the 2 tiles that I am interested in for the United States have tile coordinates of (0,1) and (1,1) both being the standard 256X256 png. These 2 tiles represent precipitation images.
In order to appropriately overlay my precipitation data I would need latitude and longitude coordinates.
This is a great link that has taught me quite a bit, but I'm still lost on the coordinate part. In order to get the pixel representation of a map tile ex (1,1) would I multiply both x and y by 256?
I feel like I can do this if I could just figure out the tile map coordinates to pixels to lat/lon values.
Maybe someone could steer me in the right direction.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, I must question why you're doing this calculation manually. There are four methods of MKMapView to convert from pixels to coordinates and back. The first two have to do with points:
- (CGPoint)convertCoordinate:(CLLocationCoordinate2D)coordinate toPointToView:(UIView *)view
- (CLLocationCoordinate2D)convertPoint:(CGPoint)point toCoordinateFromView:(UIView *)view
Additionally, you can convert rects back and forth:
- (CGRect)convertRegion:(MKCoordinateRegion)region toRectToView:(UIView *)view
- (CGRect)convertRegion:(MKCoordinateRegion)region toRectToView:(UIView *)view
These can all be found in the MKMapView reference, here.
Well I may have answered one of my questions although I'm not getting the results I thought. By using
CGPoint touchPoint = [gestureRecognizer locationInView:self.mapView];
NSLog(#"Touch point is %f %f", touchPoint.x, touchPoint.y);
I am able to touch points around the map and get the CGPoints back in a log statement. The documentation states that point (0,0) will alway be in the northwest corner according to this
The actual values I am getting though are (1.00000, 2.00000)(in NW corner). But again, the documentation says at zoom level 0 the map will consist of one big tile and then exponentially increase in respect to the zoom level. I feel like im getting closer to a solution.

Why points above 85N or below -85S are not shown on the iPhone map?

I need to represent on the map (iPhone) some points such as (88, 60) or (90, 55), but the custom annotations representing these points get deallocated. I also noticed that these points are not actually displayed on the google map, they are somehow above the visible map. This happens for any point that is above 85 deg. N latitude or -85 deg. S latitude.
I know it's a really old post, but just to answer your question.
Most (allmost all) commercial maps are displayed in the mercator projection. This is what you see in mapKit or on google maps. This means that the latitude and longitude lines run horizontal and vertical.
If you would change this to for instance polar project (world from the top) it would become way to difficult to calculate the postion of objects because the lat and long lines converge rapidly...
So it's just for ease of use....

MKMapView setRegion "snaps" to predefined zoom levels?

Can anyone confirm that setRegion "snaps" to predefined zoom levels and whether or not this behavior is as designed (although undocumented) or a known bug? Specifically, it appears that setRegion snaps to the same zoom levels that correspond to the zoom levels used when the user double-taps the map.
I'm trying to restore a previously saved region but this behavior makes it impossible if the saved region was set via a pinch zoom and not a double-tap zoom.
A big clue to me that things are broken on the mapkit side is what occurs if I call regionThatFits on the map's current region. It should return the same region (since it obviously fits the map's frame) but it returns the region that corresponds to the next higher predefined zoom level instead.
setVisibleMapRect behaves similarly.
Any further insight or information would be appreciated.
I found these related posts but neither included a solution or definitive confirmation that this is in fact a mapkit bug:
MKMapView setRegion: odd behavior?
MKMapView show incorrectly saved region
EDIT:
Here is an example that demonstrates the problem. All values are valid for my map view's aspect ratio:
MKCoordinateRegion initialRegion;
initialRegion.center.latitude = 47.700200f;
initialRegion.center.longitude = -122.367109f;
initialRegion.span.latitudeDelta = 0.065189f;
initialRegion.span.longitudeDelta = 0.067318f;
[map setRegion:initialRegion animated:NO];
NSLog(#"DEBUG initialRegion: %f %f %f %f", initialRegion.center.latitude, initialRegion.center.longitude, initialRegion.span.latitudeDelta, initialRegion.span.longitudeDelta);
NSLog(#"DEBUG map.region: %f %f %f %f", map.region.center.latitude, map.region.center.longitude, map.region.span.latitudeDelta, map.region.span.longitudeDelta);
OUTPUT:
DEBUG initialRegion: 47.700199 -122.367111 0.065189 0.067318
DEBUG map.region: 47.700289 -122.367096 0.106287 0.109863
Note the discrepancy in the latitude/longitude delta values. The map's values are almost double what I requested. The larger values correspond to one of the zoom levels used when the user double-taps the map.
Yes, it snaps to discrete levels. I've done quite a bit of experimentation, and it seems to like multiples of 2.68220906e-6 degrees of longitude per pixel.
So if your map fills the whole width of the screen, the first level spans .0008583 degrees, then the next level up you can get is twice that, .001717, and then the next one is twice that, .003433, and so on. I'm not sure why they chose to normalize by longitude, it means that fixes zoom levels vary depending on what part of the world you are looking at.
I've also spent a lot of time trying to understand the significance of that number .68220906e-6 degrees. It comes out to about 30cm at the equator, which kind of makes sense since the high resolution photos used by Google Maps have a 30cm resolution, but I would have expected them to use latitude instead of longitude to establish the zoom levels. That way, at maximum zoom, you always the native resolution of the satellite images, but who knows, they probably have some smart-people reason for making it work like that.
In my application I need to display a certain range of latitude. I'm gonna work on some code to try to zoom the map as close as possible to that. If anyone is interested, contact me.
I found a solution.
If the received snapped zoom level, is, lets say a factor of 1.2 bigger than the desired one:
use this algorithm to correct:
Asumption: you want to set the map view to exactly show "longitudinalMeters" from left to right
1) Calculate the correction scale:
Calculate the relation between longitudinal span you received, to that one you have got.
MKCoordinateRegion region = MKCoordinateRegionMakeWithDistance(center, 0, longitudinalMeters);
MKCoordinateRegion regionFits = [mapView regionThatFits: region];
double correctionFactor = regionFits.span.longitudeDelta / region.span.longitudeDelta;
2) Create the transformation and apply it to the map
CGAffineTransform mapTransform = CGAffineTransformMakeScale(correctionScale, correctionScale);
CGAffineTransform pinTransform = CGAffineTransformInvert(mapTransform);
[mapView setTransform:mapTransform];
3) Apply the inverse transformation to the Map pins, to keep them at original size
[mapView setTransform:mapTransform];
for (id<MKAnnotation> annotation in self.mapView.annotations)
{
[[self.mapView viewForAnnotation:annotation] setTransform:pinTransform];
}
The weird behavior seems to be due to the fact that while one requests a particular region or view size, the actual API call to google is invoked with a center point and a zoom level. E.G.:
map.setCenter(new google.maps.LatLng(234.3453, 454.2345), 42);
Now it would be possible for Apple to request the appropriate zoom level and then adjust the sizing of the view to accommodate the actual region request, but it seems they fail to do so. I am drawing bus routes on a map, and one of my routes barely triggers a larger zoom level and thus scales too small (under-zooms) and looks ugly and smashed.
#pseudopeach, Please update me on the progress of your attempts to work around this issue. If one could detect the boundaries of a zoom level, the region request could then be deliberately underscaled to avoid the under-zoom. Since you are onto this I would be interested in seeing your code before I have to make an attempt at it myself.
There is an interesting category that the author of the blog Backspace Prolog has written to enable the direct manipulation of the Google Maps API by emulating their setCenter(centerPoint,ZoomLevel) call signature. You can find it here. I haven't spent the time yet, but the math can probably be reverse engineered to yield a means of calculating the zoom level for a given Region or MapRect. Depending on how far it is within the zoom level's range - i.e. how far it is over the threshold that triggers the lower zoom level - it could decide whether to go to the lower level or keep to higher one by under-requesting.
This is clearly a behavioral bug that needs to be fixed so that MKMapView can be used in a more refined manner.
This is an old question, but I recently investigated Google maps in detail, and can share some insight. I don't know whether this is also valid for the current Apple maps.
The reason that the resolution snaps to predefined zoomlevels is because the original maps fetched from Google's servers are drawn with those zoomlevels. The size of the features on those maps are drawn with a certain resolution in mind. For example, the width (in pixels) of a road on those maps is always the same. On higher resolution maps, more secundary roads are drawn, but their width is always the same. The resolution snaps to predefined levels to make sure those features are always depicted with the same size. That is, it is not a bug but a feature.
Those predefined resolutions vary with latitude because of the Mercator projection of the maps. Mercator projection is easy to work with because latitude lines are depicted straight and horizontal and longitude lines are straight and vertical. But with Mercator projection the top of the map has a slightly higher resolution than the bottom (on the Northern hemisphere). That has consequences for fitting maps together at the northern and sourthern edges.
That is, when you start on the equator and drive north, then the resolution of the Mercator maps you drive over will gradually increase. The longitude lines remain vertical, and therefore the longitude spans remains the same. But the resolution increases, and therefore the latitude span decreases. Still, on all those maps the roads have the same width in pixels, and texts are depicted in the same font size, etc.
Google uses a Mercator projection where the equator circumference is 256 pixels at zoomlevel 0. Each next zoomlevel doubles that amount. That is, at zoomlevel 1, the equator is 512 pixels long, at zoomlevel 2, the equator is 1024 pixels long, etc. The model for the earth they use is a FAI globe with a radius of exactly 6371 km, or circumference of 40030 km.
Therefore, resolution for zoomLevel 0 at the equator is 156.37 km/pixel, at zoomlevel 1 it is 78.19 km/pixel, etc. Those resolutions then vary with the cosinus of the latitude anywhere else on the earth.
MKCoordinateRegion region;
region.center.latitude = latitude;
region.center.longitude = longitude;
region.span.latitudeDelta = 5.0;
region.span.longitudeDelta = 5.0;
[mapView setRegion:region animated:YES];
I restore the region with no problem and with no variance as you describe. It is really impossible to tell what is specifically wrong in your case without some code to look at but here's what works for me:
Save both the center and span values somewhere. When you are restoring them specifically set both the center and span.
Restoring should look like this:
MKCoordinateRegion initialRegion;
initialRegion.center.latitude = Value you've stored
initialRegion.center.longitude = Value you've stored
initialRegion.span.latitudeDelta = Value you've stored
initialRegion.span.longitudeDelta = Value you've stored
[self.mapView setRegion:initialRegion animated:NO];
Also remember that this method is available in 4.0: `mapRectThatFits:edgePadding: MapRectThatFits helpfully adds a reasonable border to ensure that say a map annotation on the edge is not obscured and the the rect that you're attempting to display is fully visible. If you want to control the border use the call that gives you access to set edgePadding as well.
If you set up the MapView in InterfaceBuilder, make sure you don't do this:
_mapView = [[MKMapView alloc] init];
As soon as I removed this init line, my map view suddenly began responding properly to all the updates I sent it. I suspect that what happens is that if you do the alloc init, it's actually creating another view that's not being shown anywhere. The one you see on the screen is the one initialized by your nib. But if you alloc init a new one, then that's something somewhere else and it's not going to do anything.