LightRod Location Browser

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Beta


The LightRod Location Browser is designed to work with existing augmented reality (AR) layers - in particular those from the Layar browser, but offers a radical departure from the status quo.

  • Everything about the browser is open: anybody can add data freely without permissions, and the source code is fully open source, so that anyone can create their own skin on the browser and publish it, or make enhancements to it.
  • The browser comes in different flavours, and the version currently available is a server-side script, which while not necessarily supporting the full overlaid visual data experience of AR, brings the pure functionality and AR information resource to a much wider audience. The immediate advantages are that there are no downloads required by the end-user, and a wide variety of phones are supported. In fact, every phone with a web browser (and Javascript) is supported, and the browser can also be skinned to run on a normal desktop web-browser.
  • Perhaps the most interesting development of all, is the 'URL entry', which is the standard means to access the various layers of information. Any website (or any web-page) can include meta tags to point to the location layer of information that corresponds with that URL, so that an existing site can be entered and the real world information from the site retrieved. Results can also link to other layers, so that a tree of hyperlinkable layers can be created. This is therefore a distributed system that opens up AR to the wider world.


Contents

Becoming Visible on Location Browsers

You need to add a meta tag to your home-page (or any other address), 


<meta name="oar-server" content="http://www.myurl.com/my/script.anyextension"/>

or add a value to your robots.txt file. 


OAR-server: http://www.myurl.com/my/script.anyextension

where the URL is a valid Layar or Layer enabled LightRod server. Note: if you have any custom parameters that must be called for it to be recognised as a layer, you can enter them at the end of this URL also.


Adding search filters to existing Layars

Layers from Layar are supported, with the exception of the front filters interface which is currently locked into Layer's own system.

You need to add an additional meta tag 


<meta name="oar-options" content="text_box|yourparameter|Search Parameter Explanation"/>

Where yourparameter is the parameter passed into your server URL. Or more than one text box with a comma separating the two. 


<meta name="oar-options" content="text_box|yourparameter|Search Parameter Explanation,
                                   text_box|your2ndparam|Another Explanation"/>

These values can also be added on the robots.txt file, as 'OAR-options:'. Option boxes coming soon.


Adding a description and logo

You need to add two meta tags to your home-page (or any other address), and this will appear up the top of every page including the search filters page and the results page. 


<meta name="oar-description" content="My description goes here."/>
<meta name="oar-logo" content="http://www.myurl.com/my/logoimage.jpg"/>

The logo is best at 64x64 size, but can be any size. Note: the favicon is also shown automatically.


Creating a layer link

Set a 'layerURL' parameter to = 1 in your returned JSON array for each hotspot that links back to another layer. 


JSON Array->hotspots->'actions'->[0]->['layerURL'] = 1

This will be displayed in the location browser as a 'Layer' link.


Linking to your layer from your web-page

You don't have to operate your own location browser. You can link to our one easily from your website to introduce users to your layer, and automatically initiate the geocoding process for end users. 


http://owlz.org/?url=http://mywebsiteurl.com


Helping the location effort

This browser is clearly in a very early state at the moment. We want your development support. Code is available under git version control. Please sign up for a sourceforge account if you want to contribute code, and click develop->'send a request to join this project'. Note, the license requires additions to the source code to be contributed back to the main tree.

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