SXSW: Virtually Hike National Parks With Nature Valley’s Trail View

Three years ago, granola bar-maker Nature Valley began its Preserve the Parks program to support physical restoration of the national parks. But with the company?s new initiative, Trail View, is moving into the digital realm.

The platform, which Nature Valley brought to South by Southwest, takes Google?s Street View technology and applies it to trails, allowing people to virtually navigate three national parks: Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, and the Grand Canyon. Visitors can travel the hiking trails, select points of interest, and see beautiful high-definition panoramic views with the click of a mouse.

To create Trail View, the team hiked 333 miles of trails, ascending and descended 60,000 to 80,000 feet. They captured 360-degree views with a camera rig created especially for the task. "We worked on early generation camera technology Google had used in street view," says Catherine Patterson, executive producer at McCann Erickson New York, which helped come up with the idea of the Trail View initiative. "We modified it so that we could be portable and work in the conditions we were in. it?s a beautiful mixture of technology and duct tape and spit and human will.

Endurance athlete Brandon McClain wore the 60-pound rig topped with a gyro-stabilized, 11-lens camera. He also wore a pair of peculiar glasses: Over one eye sat a lens controlled by modified Playstation controller that allowed him to see what he was shooting. "He really looked like a robot," Patterson says. "So he?s walking on tiny ledges with only one eye, and the other eye is looking through 360 degree views."

The team captured millions of images during the hikes, which they sent to Los Angeles and Sweden to be processed, optimized, and stitched together to create Trail View. Spherical mapping proved to be a sticking point, but the developers got it right with a lot of fine tuning and expanding on Google?s API. The team layered points of interest with historical and scientific factoids over the trails.

Patterson would like to expand into more parks, and maybe even draft users to help?she can envision leaving smaller versions of the camera rig in parks that hikers could use to capture images of trails themselves. But as neat as the project is, Trail View is not meant to be a replacement for the natural world. "These are your parks, this is your heritage," she says. "The takeaway from Trail View should be, I need to get there."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/sxsw-virtually-hike-national-parks-with-nature-valleys-trail-view-7358691?src=rss

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