Britain’s mapping agency is using AR to provide a new perspective on outdoor trails
By: Avi Cieplinski
Britain’s mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, has launched a 3D map feature in their OS Maps for iOS — allowing a more immersive experience before or after a trip, and helping make the outdoors more safe and accessible for people planning all kinds of adventures.
How it works
The OS Maps app helps people find and save outdoor experiences on mobile, including offline maps available by subscription. The 3D feature uses our SceneKit SDK to show a tabletop augmented reality view, providing a vivid visualization — in three dimensions and from any direction — of topography, pitch, and features along hikes, bicycle rides, or walks in the app.
From Digital Product Manager, Tim Newman:
Mapbox’s SceneKit SDK was a perfect solution for creating the new ‘Tabletop 3D’ feature in OS Maps. We’d always wrestled with how to make 3D work well on mobile (having had a popular 3D mode on OS Maps Web for some time), and using augmented reality with SceneKit was an obvious way to do it.
We’re always trying to make the outdoors more enjoyable, accessible and safe. This new feature ticks all three boxes. By previewing in 3D before you go, you can make sure that a route is safely within your fitness limits and that you’re comfortable with the terrain underfoot; a rocky knife-edge ridge might not be the best introduction to hill walking for the novice! We also hope this feature will reach new audiences and inspire them to get outside. Finally, it’s just good fun. It’s perfect for some armchair adventures or showing others where you’ve been at the pub afterwards.
Building with the SceneKit SDK
Whether you are visualizing terrain in 3D or adding a tabletop AR experience, you can use the SceneKit SDK to bring in beautiful terrain with just a few lines of code and a minimal increase in the size of their apps binary.
From OS Maps app developer Natalia Osiecka:
We’d been searching for a good solution to create 3D augmented reality maps in the OS Maps apps. We decided to go with Mapbox, because they offer an open-source solution and we’re already using their most known framework in our app, which works well. The SceneKit based solution was perfect for us, because it adds almost nothing to the size of the executable. As said previously, we prefer to select open-source solutions, because in case of bugs or missing features, we can do it ourselves and propose it as a pull request or debug on the deeper level. This flow worked perfectly here, the Mapbox team was very eager and fast to help us fix an issue in the framework and we provided our own additions to the framework as well, which both made the library richer and our feature go live without any big issues.
Integrating the framework itself into the app is fairly easy by looking at the example project. Pull requests are always reviewed and get merged if the quality is sufficient. It was a pleasure to work on integrating this framework into OS Maps app.
Here at Mapbox, we love building great tools for our developers, which is why we were so happy to launch our SceneKit SDK in May 2018 and are very excited to see the SceneKit SDK used by OS Maps.
We’ve made the SceneKit SDK open and publicly available. In their development process, the OS Maps app developer was able to contribute several important improvements to the SDK, which makes their app better and helps the entire developer community.
Get out there
OS Maps’ new 3D map is available on iOS today. Sign in, open a route, and open Tabletop 3D to view. Want to build 3D maps with AR? Download the SceneKit SDK and get started with this training.
We look forward to seeing what our developers are creating, so if you are building an app or are interested in adding 3D and AR maps to your app, send us a note.
Ordnance Survey launches 3D maps was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.