SpatialVideo captured in Fulcrum often contains a wealth of “mappable” information. Coleman previously blogged about extracting video features for mapping in OpenStreetMap and after recently rediscovering geojson.io, I wanted see if I could come up with a simple way of quickly mapping features discovered visually in geojson.io.
Geojson.io exposes a basic URL API, which allows you to actually import a chunk of GeoJSON data passed in via a URL parameter. All I had to do was provide a way for the user to easily define the locations of the features they wanted to map from the Fulcrum video viewer, and build the link to geojson.io. Fortunately, the latitude and longitude coordinates for the video frame are updated in a metadata container on the video viewer, so they can easily be grabbed from the DOM via a simple getElementsByClassName() call.
With about 30 lines of JavaScript code, I was able to build a simple bookmarklet that grabs the current coordinates and prompts the user for a title. I packaged this as a Chrome extension so all you have to do is pause the video where you see an interesting feature, click the button to map the feature and proceed until you’ve mapped all the features in that video track. When you are done, simply cancel the prompt to proceed and your features will be mapped in geojson.io.
Feel free to download the Chrome extension and try mapping some of your own video features. To install the extension, simply visit chrome://extensions/ from your Chrome browser and drag the downloaded fulcrum-video-map-extension.crx file onto the screen. Note- This extension will only work from the Fulcrum video viewer page, either within the Fulcrum record viewer, or via video data shares.