Thread: N95 Accelerometer to pinpoint camera view on map

I am thinking here of the “panorama” feature already offered by ViewRanger’s excellent mapping software. This uses the phone’s GPS to pinpoint location and heading, then shows you a panoramic view of the landscape in front of you with the names shown on all the hills etc. You can manually select a different viewpoint (e.g. “from 20 feet above my head” or “from the other side of this hill” etc) and can apply distortion to the view (e.g. make all hills twice as high so they are easier to pick out). Its a very useful and impressive feature.
Should be possible to combine with accelerometer so that now the phone will “know” not only its LOCATION and HEADING but also its ATTITUDE (angle to the ground) and hence will know exactly what bit of the map your phone camera is pointing at! So you point your camera at the view and snap away, for each photo the phone stores details (from its maps) of the map area being photographed (with appropriate tags, links etc).
One of the commonest responses to seeing an interesting photo is “where was this taken?”. With the accelerometer (plus GPS plus mapping software) the answer can be embedded in the photo!

Question: how accurate is the accelerometer? In my mapping-viewpoint-capture suggestion above, a tiny error in the camera angle could produce a huge error in identifying the map area in view.

Wow. nice info. thanx bro