Database Info

Mountain names

Hiho, last weekend I saw a tremendous application on an iPhone. Using the camara, you see the names of the hills and mountains which are in front of you. Great! Does this also exist for WinMobile-Machines?
Regards
Balu

If you want to make this into a request you have to be more specific (with picture preferably), for now I'm moving this to Q&A

Aha. Sorry for using the wrong forum. I thought this app is well known and only wanted to know weather this also exist for win mobile.
Description: Using the camera and probably gps and probaly google-maps (I don't know how it runs) you see in the preview of the camara like you expected to see plus the names of the mountains which are in front of you. I saw you can togle the depth (km) how many mountains will be reported.
This was in an area I used to be and the names were all correct. So great app and I want it without buying me an iPhone ;-)

I guess it bases on information of GPS (as you've said) and the digital compass. It would be great to have such an app for WM, but I really doubt someone will create it. iPhone OS and Android are more popular now among developers...

(REQ) Manual Focus Mod

Hey All,
This Has been mentioned before, and gained moderate insterest. but, it's been a while, and i thought I'd bring it up again.
I am searching for a Mod/app that would allow me to manually focus my camera.
Not autofocus, and not 'tap to focus' but a true manual focus.
with cameras advancing these days, it becomes more accaptable to take quality fotos with your phone. And a manual focus option will allow one to control even more thier images.
my goal was to bring more depth of field into my fotos, but time and time again, i found it focusing on the wrong objcts. for example, rain on a window, it would focus on what was behond the window...
If theres anything out there already for my HD2 android or winMo, let me know.
Otherwise, leave your opinions and maybe someone more talented than I can write this up!
Thanks guys, and take it easy.

[Q] questions about my imate ultimate 9502

hi....I am a newbie here on this forum. I have an I-mate ultimate 9502 with WM6.1 OS (i guess it's called OS, right?). I have several questions as to how I can make the most out of it.
1. Are there reliable blogs or unabridged articles that state ALL the features (not the basics) the 9502 is capable of, and tips & tricks on how to use them at their utmost level.
2. Regarding the camera, the photo taken at the first time the camera has been switched on is bright and acceptable while the next photos are either dim or blueish. I also don't understand the option Metering Mode (Frame Average, Center Weighted & Spot Metering). If you kindly please explain how this things appropriately work.
3. Is it recommended for it to be used with its default state than having SPB mobile shell installed in it.
4. And, finally (i guess), is I-mate ultimate 9502 obsolete now? and what happened to I-mate? Why is their website not accessible? Where can I find official support for I-mate phones?
Thank you very much. I have more questions but I can't think of them all right now, maybe next time.

I'm not sure at all about your phone, I only know Android.
...but, I do know a little about photography, or at least enough to help you out.
Metering is essentially how the camera decides to expose the photograph, or in other words - brighten or darken. Average takes the average light level & brightens or dims as needed for the average. This is probably the default, and should work fine for general settings. Center-weighted bases it's calculation on the center of the frame. If the center is fairly bright but the subject is off-center and in the shadows, your photo and subject will come out underexposed. Spot is similar to center, but is wherever the camera is focused.
As for the rest, I'm lost, sorry.

plainjane said:
I'm not sure at all about your phone, I only know Android.
...but, I do know a little about photography, or at least enough to help you out.
Metering is essentially how the camera decides to expose the photograph, or in other words - brighten or darken. Average takes the average light level & brightens or dims as needed for the average. This is probably the default, and should work fine for general settings. Center-weighted bases it's calculation on the center of the frame. If the center is fairly bright but the subject is off-center and in the shadows, your photo and subject will come out underexposed. Spot is similar to center, but is wherever the camera is focused.
As for the rest, I'm lost, sorry.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thanks po to your reply. I now undestand the difference of those options. It will help me make use of my camera even much often. Thanks again po.

[Q] App Development Help

Thanks for the help!

SMBulls9 said:
Hi,
I am trying to develop an app, with little experience of WP7, on Visual Studio Ultimate 2010, in C#. The app I am trying to develop needs to be able to take your pulse using the flash of the camera to illuminate your finger and then detect the changes in brightness to calculate it. To do this, would I be better off recording a video for like ten seconds in the background (the UI will just be text that says place your finger over the lens) or would I need to use a while loop and have it take a picture like every 40 milliseconds then have will flip through the pictures and see how often a dark spot comes up or something? Any code examples or links would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, I didn't caught the idea of the app you want to develop, but if I understood you right and you want to measure pulse by taking photos/videos of a finger, it looks like some kind of science fiction. Just imagine the accuracy needed for such calculations and how will you keep you finger still.
Talking about video: if I am not mistaken all the currently existing background agents are restricted to use Camera API, may be I'm a bit wrong here.
For learning C# for Windows Phone 7 it is good to begin from MSDN and bunch of code samples stored there or a book.
Best regards.

This is actually already being done on other smartphone platforms; hell, people are using smartphone sensors for all kinds of crazy things, including a number of medical applications.
Given that the highest pulse you're ever likely to encounter is about 240 BPM / 4Hz (250ms between beats), 40ms resolution seems more than needed. That said, that's only 25 FPS, while I believe the video camera shots at 30 FPS (33ms). However, taking pictures probably won't work so well because of the need to JPEG-compress the images after taking them (I think the camera API *always* does this, though I might be wrong). Using the video stream API seems like a much better idea.
You shouldn't need the background APIs at all; not sure why the guy above me talked about them. My understanding is that these apps just sample for a few seconds, enough to get an accurate reading.
You may get better info in the App Development sub-section of the WP7 D&H forum. That said, don't expect people to write your code for you, especially for something where there's a reasonable chance of it being a commercially viable Marketplace app. I suggest you start with MSDN, but reading the docs and looking at the examples. You can also go look up tutorials and example code online for using the video APIs.

Question Photosphere - impossible so far on S22

I can't believe that making a photosphere in this day and age is impossible on the S22 Ultra.
I've not been able to create one with any software so far that I've tried. Google Street view for instance is useless because it doesn't have the ability to figure out the focal length of the lens so the stitching is a complete mess.
Does anyone know of a solution? Or am I wasting my time.
If not does anyone know of an assist app that will provide the guides (like) Google street view but save the individual pictures so I can use stitching on the PC?

louiscar said:
I can't believe that making a photosphere in this day and age is impossible on the S22 Ultra.
I've not been able to create one with any software so far that I've tried. Google Street view for instance is useless because it doesn't have the ability to figure out the focal length of the lens so the stitching is a complete mess.
Does anyone know of a solution? Or am I wasting my time.
If not does anyone know of an assist app that will provide the guides (like) Google street view but save the individual pictures so I can use stitching on the PC?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Samsung used to have a camera plugin that allowed you to capture several images and stich them together. I could do it on my S8+ and Note 8. It was a little clunky, but it produced decent results.
Samsung stopped supporting it after the Note/S 9 series because I couldn't do it on my Note 10+. It wasn't a widely used feature.
Here are some PC and Mac apps that can do 3D image stitching. Not all are free.
Best Photo Stitching Software for Making Panoramas (2023)
An updated roundup of some of the best photo stitching apps for making panoramas, from free and simple to paid and powerful.
havecamerawilltravel.com

gernerttl said:
Samsung used to have a camera plugin that allowed you to capture several images and stich them together. I could do it on my S8+ and Note 8. It was a little clunky, but it produced decent results.
Samsung stopped supporting it after the Note/S 9 series because I couldn't do it on my Note 10+. It wasn't a widely used feature.
Here are some PC and Mac apps that can do 3D image stitching. Not all are free.
Best Photo Stitching Software for Making Panoramas (2023)
An updated roundup of some of the best photo stitching apps for making panoramas, from free and simple to paid and powerful.
havecamerawilltravel.com
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Gernerttl,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes I had this feature on my Note 4 which did deal with spherical panoramas (or photospheres ) and it did a great job.
As I say the problem with apps that do this now fail on some smartphones due to the focal length of the lenses and the ineptitude of the software in failing to find out what that fl is.
So whilst Google and other software are good at guiding you in covering the whole sphere the stitching is poor and sadly they are so basic that they don't make the separate photos available so you can export them.
The link you gave is for stitching software and that isn't the problem for me.
Ideally I'd like to find software that would work on the phone but if not I'd like to find software that would provide the guiding process of covering the sphere and save the separate tiles so I can then put them into the stitching software.

louiscar said:
Hi Gernerttl,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes I had this feature on my Note 4 which did deal with spherical panoramas (or photospheres ) and it did a great job.
As I say the problem with apps that do this now fail on some smartphones due to the focal length of the lenses and the ineptitude of the software in failing to find out what that fl is.
So whilst Google and other software are good at guiding you in covering the whole sphere the stitching is poor and sadly they are so basic that they don't make the separate photos available so you can export them.
The link you gave is for stitching software and that isn't the problem for me.
Ideally I'd like to find software that would work on the phone but if not I'd like to find software that would provide the guiding process of covering the sphere and save the separate tiles so I can then put them into the stitching software.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here is what I found. Have you tried any of these?
The best 360-degree camera apps for iOS and Android | Digital Trends
A 360-degree photo lets you observe a scene from a single point of view. We show you the best 360-degree camera apps for iOS and Android.
www.digitaltrends.com

gernerttl said:
Here is what I found. Have you tried any of these?
The best 360-degree camera apps for iOS and Android | Digital Trends
A 360-degree photo lets you observe a scene from a single point of view. We show you the best 360-degree camera apps for iOS and Android.
www.digitaltrends.com
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes I was working off that list actually as searches are so limited this is about the only thing that comes up.
Google view and one of the others proved exactly the same - Google obviously implemented that companies version into their street view.
One is for IOS only and I have not tried (but will) the last two even though they appear to have less regard for settings. I'll look at some of the Android stitchers too in case some offer the assist to take the photos. Most expect you to already have taken them with adequate overlaps but as you can imagine doing a whole sphere and making sure you are tracking what you have covered so far is a pain.
Thanks for the help I will try the offerings here but unless they photosphere offerings allow you to change camera lens FL they will assume a standard lens and fail. I'm surprised developers did not think of this as it's a complex process and I would have thought it'd have been essential.

You're welcome. I'm not sure it'll get fixed anytime soon. Not until OEMs figure out how to make a camera module that can implement an optical zoom with ultra-wide to super-telephoto focal lengths using one lens.

Hehe, well finally I've worked my way through all the pathetic offerings. All the apps are kiddy type apps which have no complexity whatsoever, most just do circular panos and the stitchers were even worse refusing to deal with anything but circular panos.
Sadly disappointing.
I think the only solution is to get a 360 standalone camera, these do video which I'm not interested in, so expensive and the quality isn't up to the camera on the S22 Ultra. [sigh 2023 - that's what we get - LOL)

Gcam has a photosphere plug in, I've just tried it seems ok, but maybe you've already tried?

alienex said:
Gcam has a photosphere plug in, I've just tried it seems ok, but maybe you've already tried?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, I had a link to a table of models and versions (somewhere) and when I checked there wasn't a gcam version for the S22 range.
Can you tell me which one you installed?
My version is also with Exynos chip if that matters.

Not sure if I can link it but Google gcam s22 ultra and its the getdroidtips link but I've just checked and I'm using snapdragon model.

OK, thanks

You can capture (for now) 360° photos with Street View app from Google.

Salkrikaltor said:
You can capture (for now) 360° photos with Street View app from Google.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As per my first post. Done that - it fails to stitch properly.

Unfortunately 360 image capture has, for the most part, gone back to being a niche genre. The Samsung 360 camera plugin worked pretty well. Then Samsung dropped support for it when it decided to market and produce a 360 camera. Unfortunately, Samsung's foray into producing 360 image capture didn't last that long. Because the market is small, it was already saturated with devices made by Ricoh, Go Pro, Insta360, etc.

GCAM :
MGC_8.1.101_A9_GV1zfix_ruler.apk
Has a working photosphere on exynos S22ultra
https://1-dontsharethislink.celsoazevedo.com/file/filesc/MGC_8.1.101_A9_GV1zfix_ruler.apk

brouwerchris said:
GCAM :
MGC_8.1.101_A9_GV1zfix_ruler.apk
Has a working photosphere on exynos S22ultra
https://1-dontsharethislink.celsoazevedo.com/file/filesc/MGC_8.1.101_A9_GV1zfix_ruler.apk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you . Will give that a try.
I actually tried Google view outside and it failed on top and bottom stitching unlike when I tried it indoors where it failed to stitch almost everything.
Hopefully this will be better.!!

gernerttl said:
Unfortunately 360 image capture has, for the most part, gone back to being a niche genre. The Samsung 360 camera plugin worked pretty well. Then Samsung dropped support for it when it decided to market and produce a 360 camera. Unfortunately, Samsung's foray into producing 360 image capture didn't last that long. Because the market is small, it was already saturated with devices made by Ricoh, Go Pro, Insta360, etc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I recently got fired up because I bought a DJI mini 3 pro and the spherical panos on that are superb.
Got to thinking about them again and having access to panos on the ground.
Which makes me also wonder about the viewer.
Gallery on my S23 works fine if the meta shows a pano. I get a 360 photo button when it's recognised and it will display with several options.
I sent this to my friend and he has the S20 and his Gallery doesn't seem to support pano viewing at all.
Found that strange since I had the viewer on my Note 4 many years ago and the S20 isn't very old at all.
Oh well.