PeakFinder: See the view from any mountain or hill

http://www.peakfinder.org

by apsec112 • 7 years ago

13 4 7 years ago

dewey• 7 years ago

I use the iOS app a lot when I’m hiking back in Austria. It’s always fun to play around and works very well.

mosselman• 7 years ago

Pretty cool although somewhat Spartan. Something that I find that could be improved on is what if feels like when looking around. To me it feels as if I am moving across a horizontal axis, rather than rotating. This is probably because there are some visual elements missing that would convince the brain that you are looking around. When I look around in an FPS shooter it doesn't feel as if I am moving horizontally, for example.

tompark• 7 years ago

This didn't show anything in Safari or Firefox. Finally I tried Chrome and could see the SVG display.

It's pretty cool, but yeah, I don't see ever using this on desktop. It makes a whole lot more sense on mobile while you're out in the mountains and can see the scenery.

Regarding the AR apps:

In 2018 I downloaded both the PeakFinder and PeakVisor iOS apps while in Namche Bazaar during my EBC trek. PeakFinder's maps were much smaller and downloaded over bad wifi fairly quickly, whereas I never managed to download all of the PeakVisor maps while on the trek (it was several GB). But oddly, PeakFinder did not give me any more information than PeakVisor. So when a mountain label was missing in PeakVisor, PeakFinder wouldn't tell me either.

It's a pain to export photos from the PeakFinder app, so I did use it for a couple days on the way up to Lobuche, but not much after that.

The PeakVisor display was a lot nicer than PeakFinder's back then, so I preferred those photos and ended up using it exclusively. It looks like PeakFinder has better/shorter peak labels now, but still takes extra steps to export a photo, which is kind of a dealbreaker.

A nice thing about PeakFinder is that it still costs a fixed price for the app. If this is the only mountain AR app you use, it's worth it.

PeakVisor has transitioned to an IAP "Pro" subscription. Since I bought PeakVisor in 2018, they grandfathered my install with all the original features, with temporary free access to Pro features, so I can't tell what features are Pro or not, but it's super fancy now. If you're into hiking, then I suggest you give PeakVisor a try as well. (I have no affiliation.)

dangerden• 7 years ago

A PeakVisor developer here :-) I suggest giving a try to peakvisor.com - it also renders panoramas for any place in the world, allows searching for peaks, and provides detailed information on mountains like mountain ranges this mountain belongs to, national parks, key col, isolation, topographical parent, etc. We originally built it to manage our data but it appears to be very valuable for others as well.

PeakFinder: See the view from any mountain or hill

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