Show HN: My new iOS app showing the Colosseum real-size and scaled

itunes.apple.com

3 points·craig_asp··3 comments

I just made this free AR app to show a detailed model of the Colosseum in 1:1, 1:10 or 1:100 scale. The plan is to add more real-size models with upcoming updates. Let me know what you think - does it work well? Is it interesting for you?

That looks neat! I'm going to check it out.

It gave me a related app idea. Maybe it would require gmaps integration and probably wouldn't be AR, so probably a different app altogether. But, what about an app that plopped famous ancient landmarks into my neighborhood? And let me "walk" out of my front door & walk down to the Colosseum or Great Pyramids? That would give a really cool sense of scale because it would juxtapose the environment I know best (my home) with the environment I'm learning about. (If anybody wants to take this idea feel free, I don't know mobile development)

Tangents aside I will check out your very cool looking app today.

I already tried adding a model based on its lat/lon. Unfortunately, the gps in mobile devices is not accurate enough to position the model exactly where I want it to be. It seems like no matter what I do, the real-world lat/lon is between 5 and maybe 20m off (even if I filter location results to be better than say 4m horizontal accuracy).

If you don’t care about exact positioning and orientation, it could work. Say you walk around your neighbourhood and you see objects placed around certain locations like a park, sone other open area, etc. But if you want the model to always stick to exactly the same point, it will be a lot harder, even if you use third-party services like Mapbox.

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