GPS Coordinates in Theta App too coarse and not enough decimal places in the Lat Long. Theta V

THETA Media
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Thanks pm4gis for not giving up. May be just two of us can make it fixed especially with your expertise in GIS.

I just mention Google Maps as it is the most common application for both a V and a Z1. V is advertised on Google pages as a suitable hardware for Google Trusted Photographers and I am sure Z1 will be there soon too.

I do understand that the problem is with recording/storing/passing decimal points in the app.

In my vision the Theta app takes a location from the phone(Android most likely uses a float64 variable to store precision up to mm), and try to record it into some variable type that cannot handle more than 3 or 4 DP. It gets rounded in metadata filling the rest decimal points with 0s or 9s and brings it to 50-100cm precision. That’s why on a short path they are shown as taken in one spot.

How exactly it happens that precision is rounded to 3 or 4 DP and what part of the app code it happens we cannot even guess without seeing the Theta app code. However Ricoh can figure it out looking at their code and after they run some tests. Once found they can fix it in seconds and issue an update.

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I just want to point to one more thing. Taking panoramas as a business for GSV(Google Street View) application or custom business tours requires that there is no photographer captured in a panorama. Unfortunately all one click 360 cameras I know will capture the photographer because of the way they work.

However what sets apart both Theta V and Z1 is that Ricoh have made a plugin this year called Time Shift that allows a photographer to stand near a camera and not being captured.

That alone adds a lot of value for me using V or Z1. Now with this plugin I do not need to hide, walk away and that’s with my phone placed under a tripod(otherwise location would be wrong). With the use of this plugin I now spend less time on taking each panorama and I am not risking people bumping into my camera setup while I hide or worse grabbing my setup or my phone and running away with it.

So I really want to stick to Theta cameras just because of this plugin alone. No other manufacturer offers something like this. Whoever decided to make this plugin available has made a great favor to Ricoh.
However with this bug with location precision it does make it super difficult and time consuming to use these cameras for commercial work that involves using precise panorama location.

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@MikeWM thanks for this detailed information.

I’ve organized this into a slide that we’ll present to a RICOH manager as part of a community feedback meeting.

I’ll summarize these points from you and @pm4gis

  • gps tag applied from mobile app should be DD.DDDDDDD instead of the current DD.DDD (the D is a decimal place)
  • The Google StreetView app records greater accuracy than the RICOH THETA app when used with the same THETA camera
  • link to this forum thread

My opinion:

  • Google StreetView is a popular use case for the THETA and thus, we can make a good case
  • There is authentic user voice from real GSV photographers that would like to improve their workflow on this discussion thread. This helps make a good case. The more GSV photographers that want the feature, the better
  • There is precise testing from authentic photographers with results on this thread. This helps.

To be straightforward with you, I’m unlikely to be able to replicate the test myself before I present the slide. @jcasman and I are helping judges with a RICOH THETA plug-in developer contest and there’s been so many entries that we’re backlogged with testing the plug-ins. We need to finish the testing of the entries ASAP so that we can announce the winners.

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Thank you Craig for doing it. If you want I can provide some visual data for the slide. I can take a few panoramas along 25-30 meters path around my house. And while I am taking them I will keep logging my location from my smartphone. Then I put the panoramas on the google maps with their location read from metadata as it has been recorded by the Theta app and add my path from the location log. This way they will see how big the problem is.

And I am sure pm4gis can add something extra as an experienced GIS specialist.

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@MikeWM, thanks for the offer. However, I don’t want to trouble you with extra work until I get initial feedback or questions from my contacts at RICOH. I talk with them on a fairly regular basis, so there’s opportunity to present additional information in the future.

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It is not a problem as I would love to see it fixed for my and other user benefits. So I am happy to do whatever it takes to get it fixed.
If it is required please let me know. and I will do it

I am also digging on how Android is using Location class and how you can get location data from it in another app.
Please see it at https://developer.android.com/reference/kotlin/android/location/Location?hl=en

There may be something going bad(or coded wrongly) after Theta gets location data from the Location class and converts it into a format with decimal number.
Another point to check when it is written to a panorama metadata.

Please note that I am not an Android developer but having over 10 years experience in web development(c#, asp.net) and developing small tools for Windows it is not that hard to read a code for another system and their SDK.

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