Sardinia Innovation

iGeoPix is an iPhone/iPad interactive visual browser for geolocated photos. Unlike the current georeferenced pictures representations used by Panoramio, Google map, Yahoo! map, etc., with iGeoPix you will be able to see both near (center focus) and far (periferic context) photos, thanks to a non-linear zooming user interface. The variable tile size, bigger in the center and smaller near the borders, will further contribute to give you the feeling of a more immersive visual browsing experience.

Imagine to browse the Google map and get the most relevant geolocated pictures of the current map area with a magnifying glass through a tiled view composed of three concentric levels. The first level is filled with only one large tile containing an image considered the most representative around the map's center. The second level is composed by tiles laid around the first level like a crown, displaying the next 12 images relative to the map area around the first level. Consequently the third level, composed by 36 tiles positioned around the second level, corresponds to a more distant area from the center of the map.

iGeoPix it's free, try it now: start in landscape and “Photos” mode, enter a search string, then click on any image to recenter and renew the mosaic of geolocated photos. To zoom, double click to see medium resolution, then click on “High resolution”. Click on title bar to jump to panoramio page.

iGeoPix is your ideal mobile companion to:

- visually browse the world by pictures in three modes: Map, Photo, Multi

- jump to your current location using internal GPS

- show the pictures in full screen mode

- select a picture and go to the relative web page

- search a location by name or address

Panoramio is currently used as georeferenced image resource.

Fractal view

CRS4 designed and developed the so-called "fractal view" originally for web browsers. A new browsing modality is devised in which maps can be used at the beginning and at the end of the activity without drawing too much attention because the user is not required to continuously drag and zoom. The system is inspired to the magnifying glass metaphor, is accessible as a web application and allows an intuitive and pleasant navigation among the millions of geo-referenced pictures available on the Internet. The implementation of the “magnifying glass” is a web page which shows a little interactive map on the left of the screen (alternatively it could be on a separate window) and a fractal tiled structure on the right (full screen size if the map is on a separate window). Such tiled view, the only “object” where users's attention is focused on, is composed by three concentric levels. The first level is filled with only one large tile containing an image considered the most representative around the current position.

This level is related to a region relatively small (for instance a square with 1Km of side) around the current point of view. The second level is composed by twelve tiles laid around the first level like a crown. Each tile in the second level is filled with a picture representative of a region more remote with a size one order of magnitude larger. For instance, if the tile in the first level is related to a region of 1Km, each tile in the second level is related to a region with size of 10Km while tiles in the third level are related to even more remote regions with larger sizes of 100Km.

The progression 1,10,100 Km is purely an example and the user can set the initial scale and the progression base (see Figure for more details). A tile on top of the view is related to a northern region and vice versa in all directions. The user controls the initial point of view and the scale using the interactive map and the system fills the tiles in the fractal view with the appropriate images. The map is just an optional support and the browsing activity can continue in the fractal view. When the mouse is over a picture the distance between the current point of view and that picture is popped in a label over the picture, while clicking on a picture causes the current point of view to be moved at the new point and the entire fractal view is repainted. Finally, clicking on the central image (corresponding to the current point of view), the system changes scale zooming in the entire view passing for instance from the progression 1Km, 10Km, 100Km to 100m, 1Km, 10Km. 

A technical description can be found on the published paper Fractal Browsing of Large Geo-Referenced Picture Sets (by Davide Carboni, Valentina Marotto, Francesco Massidda and Pietro Zanarini, Communications of SIWN, System and Information Sciences Notes, Vol 5 - August 2008).

This Flickr set contains 50+ snapshot pictures of gorgeous places around the world, made by iGeoPix on iPad.

iGeoPix is an iPad/iPhone universal application, designed and produced by Information Society division at CRS4 research center in Sardinia (Italy).

Link Box

www.crs4.it

Geoweb.crs4.it

twitter: twitter.com/igeopix
email: igeopix@gmail.com