LightRod - Open Source Augmented Reality Server

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Introduction

Welcome to LightRod.org, the open source augmented reality server, or POI (Point of Interest) search.

The software started out life as MobileMaps from 1998-2009, written in Perl, and has now been converted into PHP. Given the proliferation of geo-websites, geo-data, geo-browsers (Firefox 3.5 and the iphone Safari browser) and now augmented reality phone browsers, the need arose for an open source geographic search engine, or proximity search. In its simplest form, it takes a database of points with latitude/longitude, and a search request at a given latitude/longitude, and returns the points sorted by distance.

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The software is scalable to any number of records, and uses 'peano codes', or space filling curves to find the nearest results, no matter what distance they are from the request. Read more on why this is important.

The engine can be seen in augmented reality at

  • Thundre Layar local product finder using the advanced keyword geo-search, with over 500 million location based keywords (the keyword functionality is not currently included in LightRod, but is available as a service). Search for 'thundre' in the Layar browser in the UK, or see a video at Thundre.

and on the Web at

  • Padz global rental real estate site
  • AskTheLocal using a postcode search on the same database as the Thundre product finder
  • Alien Goggles global product search built for Firefox 3.5

This complements Google Maps and other online mapping tools, by allowing nearby search results to be found, and then plotted on the map or in the browser. Because it runs on your own server, you can choose to keep your data private.

New: Beta integration with Layar. See LightRod Layar API.



Contents

Getting started

Download, unpack the source PHP file into your project directory on your web server. Then follow the instructions in our Getting Started section to carry out a search on your own data.

What does the code look like? 



$bg = new clsBasicGeosearch();
$params = array('latitude' => 50.00,			//Latitude in decimal degrees of center of search
	        'longitude' => 120.00,			//Longitude in decimal degrees of center of search
		'table_name' => "tbl_points",		//Main table name that is being searched on
		'id_field' => "int_point_id",		//Unique reference to each point in the table
		'latitude_field' => "dec_latitude",	//Field in table that has the latitude in decimal
		'longitude_field' => "dec_longitude",	//Field in table that has the longitude in decimal
		'peano_field_header' => "int_peano"	//First letters of fields in table that hold 
				 			//peano integers E.g. 'int_peano', which gets 
				 			//appended to create 'int_peano1, int_peano2,
                                                        //int_peano1iv, int_peano2iv'	
		);
$results_array = $bg->proximity_finder($params);

API

See the API Reference.

For assistance

Please send us feedback on our feedback form, or post to our forum

Useful links


Getting started on this Wiki

Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.


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