P3 is driving a large, fluffy badger around Norway this summer. I’ve been working on tracking the car and outputting it on a flash map.
Our idea was to track the car with some sort of GPS technology. In the end we ended up with a pretty simple solution. The reporters are taking still photos with a GPS-enabled phone and uploads these to a flickr account. Then we take the geotagged RSS feed from flickr and cache it on our server and read it into a flash map. This map of Norway is a simplified, stylized graphic that is based on a real map that has pretty evenly distributed lat and long degrees.
My flash code parses the geo coordinates from the images and converts them to x and y positions on the map. Each photo becomes a time-stamped marker, giving us an approximate route that I use to calculate driving speed, length driven and gasoline used. Our tests showed it was pretty accurate – enough to give people an easy way of following the car as it zips across Norway.
The hardest parts of this project was converting lat and long degrees to x and y and getting reliable results. An accurate 2D map would probably have needed degrees that take curvature into consideration, but then it would probably be easier to use google maps API. But it wouldn’t look very cool.