Launch of the Openhanced Location Starter Kit with #Layar functionality

Posted in: Android, Augmented Reality, Blog, Mobile, iPhone by openhanced on April 6, 2010

NEWS: Openhanced is releasing a new Sports/freetime activity Layar next week in cooperation with a German company. Above 300000 tracks listed worldwide including elevation/weather data.

Online help | Download

We are, as planned, delivering the Location Starter kit to provide individuals and organizations with a solution that can be used in combination with mobile applications like Layar.

The development of this solution has taken a while and this Freemium version is the blue print for our GEO Data warehouse where people with different roles can manage location content in a user friendly way. Our first goal is to make the solution available to anyone who is interested in location oriented solutions.

For us Layar is the showcase application that we use a lot to provide people with an awesome demo. However, Openhanced is involved in several Enterprise location based solutions for users or employees. To fulfill end user solutions you need a flexible backend for demonstrations.

Some information before you start the download

As with every software solutions and deciding on releases and time frames there are a few small minor issues, mostly related to validation during installation:

• The install wizard can one click install but make sure all your MySQL details are correct;
• Double-check if you need the special 755 permissions on the mentioned files;
• Get a Google Maps key that is needed for the location picker.

Scalability

The backend location management system is built on PHP and MySQL and can be used in a live production environment if needed. We use it for a few solutions that serve a quarter of a million data points and we think that is still fine performance wise.

Downloading and unpacking

You can download the solution here. Make sure after downloading to unpack the zip file and to upload it to your PHP/MySQL server. Call the install.htm through your browser after uploading.

To get help before you upload and install visit our extensive online help.

The Layar Open Source creation tool will be released next week, the name is OHLSK.

Posted in: Android, Augmented Reality, Blog, Mobile, Open Source by openhanced on March 26, 2010

Right now OHLSK is the short name for Openhanced Location Starter Kit. It can be used as a backend for any mobile location client but right now it supports Layar out of the box.

In between business – we are working on: a big sports activity Layar, location based SMS services, mobile app., several new Mobile 2.0 concepts – i’m glad to say that there has been a lot of progress in the OHLSK. We needed to extract a Freemium set of capabilities from the total solution and that has gone well. Below are some screenshots of the final Freemium solution:

There are some things still to add or change:

• creation of Layar actions in multiple languages;
• authentication;
• spatial search optimization;
• URI types.

However, these are minor changes and it will not postpone the release. The release will contain extensive help on how to configure and install the solution on your own PHP/MySQL environment.

The total solution (with more capabilities) that we are working on serves as a base backend for all our concepts and projects in the future.