Swiss geodata (cartographic, topographic, toponymic), once Switzerland's most protected data (for reasons of military defence), have become freely available in the past years. At the same time webtech has greatly evolved. Today mobile webpages can access many of the hardware components built into modern smartphones, such as camera, gyroscope, and compass modules. This allows for coding Augmented Reality apps that will run on any smartphone, just by entering a URL or pointing to a QR code.

MONT is a Javascript-driven web app that lets you discover the hills and mountain tops around you. Point to any hilltop within sight, tap on the red button and get the hill or mountain name, its distance and height above sea level.

MONT is a Augmented Reality web app coded in "vanilla" JS. It is a proof of concept in order to demonstrate that AR applications for mobile phones can be done just by using open technologies such as HTML 5 (CSS 3, Javascript ES 6).

Tech

MONT is coded in Javascript only ("vanilla" JS, hence no external dependencies, no frameworks, no libraries, no third-party services of any kind). MONT is a so-called flat-file webapp, which means that the required data (digital height model, toponymy and georeferences) are stored in JS arrays (instead of a database) that are cached by the web browser, so that the app, once loaded, will also work in offline mode.

Data

• Digital height model of Switzerland (based on a 200m grid)
• Swiss geographical Names (georeferenced)

Team:

• Thomas Weibel
• Dirshti Gopwani

Credits

Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo)