Geo-aware ebook demo
by Liza Daly
We’re making the geo demo featured in the Interactivity in EPUB talk available for download under the MIT License.
About the demo
In the demo, the geolocation capability of the web browser transmits your latitude/longitude. The code then queries the Geonames database to get an English placename.
After that, the code will continually poll for your current location. If you remain still, text will be displayed to indicate that the main character is bored and waiting to set off on her adventure. When your lat/long changes, it displays new text.
What’s in the demo
This is a ZIP file bundle of the following resources:
- The geo code itself, in JavaScript, CSS and XHTML
- A copy of the Monocle ereader by Inventive Labs
- A copy of geo-location-javascript, which provides a simplified API to the HTML5 geolocation feature
- The embedded font IM Fell English Pro, converted to SVG format for use on iPads/iPhones.
The book content is in the form expected by Monocle, not EPUB, though if someone wanted to produce an EPUB version I would be happy to link to it. It should be possible to produce a valid EPUB file though very few ereaders would be able to run it.
Try it now
You can also try it out in a geo-aware browser. This should work in Chrome, Firefox and Safari 5, as well as on iPads and iPhones (and probably Android), though the user interface will need to be changed to support smaller devices.
Keep in mind that if you’re on a real computer, you’ll never see the “you’ve moved” state change since your location is based on your internet service provider. Even on a mobile device, it can take quite some distance to update your position as GPS does not discriminate very finely.
Comments
[...] without comments via blog.threepress.org [...]
Have you played ‘Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill’ by any chance? This is a location-based game/tour set in Boston. It’s been on my iPhone for awhile, but I’m in Boston so rarely it hasn’t bubbled to the top yet.
[...] Liza Daly shared an epub demo which pulls in the reader’s location, and makes decisions about the character’s actions [...]
I haven’t, I’ll check it out! And thanks for teaching me the fancier-sounding name “locative texts.”
I wanted to try this on my geo-aware and very mobile iPhone, but unfortunately I’m not able to resize the page in mobile Safari to match the screen size, and therefore I only see a small fraction of the page. Bummer; it seems like a clever little demo.
Right, at some point I may change it to be resizable, or I would be happy to post an updated version if someone else modified it.
Liza, it would probably suffice to change the viewport meta tag so that width was hardcoded to 600. Or even remove the meta tag altogether?
This got me thinking…
HTML5 also makes it easy to include audio in the code. Could you make an audio guide in the of a ePub book, where your location triggered different audio files to be played?
Anders, that would be very similar to how DAISY accessible ebooks work: http://www.daisy.org/ (and DAISY is already closely aligned with EPUB).
[...] from accessing remote URLs. This means that ebooks that interact with remote data, like the geo-aware ebook, do not work. Interestingly, this is one of the restrictions that Baldur Bjarnason suggested might [...]
Hi
I’ve tried geo localization with Opera and result is an error’s pop-up :
————————————
ReferenceError: Security violation
————————————
obviously google geoloc work fine.