Remix OS to use SV App on PC

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This post is about the Street View App running on PC and I post it here, not in the exclusive SV Trusted board because there are people not trusted SV photographers yet but may still be interested.

First it was @DanielArnolf who brought my attention to Remix OS, an Android simulator (well, originally designed to play android games on PC’s but of course, it can run other apps too) in this post.

Now somehow that ancient thread emerged again and I finally installed it.

It’s a bit clumsy (at first - maybe) and note that its latest version is from November 2016 - but quite a lot of smart phones still run Android versions from that time and they can run the SV App without issues.

I “revisited” an old project where I used my Samsung Gear 360 (2016 edition) with the SV App set to automatically take shots at every n seconds. I was hoping to track a whole street in a small village but unfortunately the app crashed at about half way. Anyway, I made 44 photo spheres this way and slowly (very slowly) they indeed started to get connected. Of course, there were a lot of “holes” between the connected sections but after a year or so, almost everything worked flawlessly.

It was a hopeless job to manually position and connect all the dots on a smartphone display. Some people like @LucioV either use a dedicated tablet or (lately) some 3rd party tools but if I were as thin as my wallet, I would be a glad man so I do not spend any extra as long as it’s just a hobby for me.

Anyway, it was such a relief to see all the 44 dots together, being able to zoom in, click on connections to establish or delete them with ease (and the accuracy of a mouse pointer) that now I think I’ll never look back when it comes to such a complex task.

Here’s a screenshot of the emulator with the area:

remix-os.png
remix-os.png1600×900 194 KB

Maybe it is a bit weird to see the app horizontally (especially with the wide horizon at the bottom) but you can actually “turn” the tablet to vertical (well, virtually of course). I will try that next time.

I hope you all like it, and thanks for this contribution again, @DanielArnolf and a Happy New Year to you - and all.

Edit: and to prove that usefulness (well, at least if you find my above little review and promotion useful) comes with rewards, it turned out that this was my 100th topic started and I even got a badge :slight_smile:

100-post-badge.png

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@Csaba Thanks for sharing, downloading now :slight_smile:

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Let me know your findings, @StephenAbraham .I have already found an issue - I cannot zoom out (either in the SV App or the GMaps App).

Zooming in (when not fully zoomed yet) is easy: just double click on the empty map area and keep double clicking. But I have not found any way to zoom back out yet.

Edit: I have found it (what wonders a single Google search can make! :slight_smile:

Double click with the mouse but hold the second click and start moving the held down cursor up and down to zoom in/out. It works in edit mode, too…

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Thanks @Csaba ! If there is a Mac version I will give it a try!

I’ve tried bluestacks in the past, but never worked smooth.

Thanks!

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Welcome, @LucioV . I doubt they are going to build a Mac version. This one is more than a year old, too, and essential bugs have not been fixed yet (see below). On top of all, as I mentioned above, it was mainly built as a gamer platform and as we know, games are mainly dveloped on PC’s (beside mobile) and most of the gamers therefore have PC’s.

Mac’s are for artists :slight_smile:

Anyway, a serious bug: if I use it in portrait mode (as the SV App was also designed), the mouse cursor gets stuck in a movement as if it was still in landscape. I.e. when I move the mouse up/down, the cursor is moving left/right - and vice versa. Finding discussions on boards about this issue shows that it was a problem over a year ago, too.

This means I need to use it in landscape mode and live with that extremely wide horizon that I could wrap around my neck as a scarf twice. Hard to navigate in it and guess where the middle of the screen is. I may mark it on my monitor with a felt pen after measuring it with a ruler. :-)))

Screen resolution settings in “advanced mode” do not work at all. I always get the same resolution.

But hey; it’s still a tool for projects that I showed above so let’s not complain and look a gift horse in the mouth… It is good for what it is.

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Hi, @Csaba

Thank you for your sharing the useful information. I also have tried some “Android simulator” including Remix OS. But they did not work well for me.

Now I use Google Chrome + Vysor to display SV app of Android on my desktop PC(Windows 10 64bit). Mouse and keyboard are available for moderating the big tour. Pinch in/out , Zoom in/out, Connecting and aligning panos, adding caption…etc. very easy and smooth.

Have you tried it?

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@user_not_found wrote:

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Now I use Google Chrome + Vysor to display SV app of Android on my desktop PC.

Have you tried it?

No, I haven’t (yet) but I definitely will. Thanks for the ideea, @user_not_found !

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Was looking for a SV app to use with a desktop. Thanks for sharing this. Since I’m a mac user I’ll be conducting an emulatorception for Remix OS > Windows > VirtualBox > OSX

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@Haseeb fyi

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Hi @user_not_found , I have finally tested Vysor myself, too. Also promising. True that the resolution will not “grow” just because I can see my phone on a desktop, but with dots very close to each other, manipulation of them seems to be much easier with a small mouse pointer than my sausage fingers on a smart phone.

vysor.png
vysor.png1680×1050 369 KB

And the very great advantage is that I can manipulate the SV App either on the touch screen of my phone or with the mouse on the desktop screen at the same time.

So thanks again for suggesting!

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Thanks @StephenAbraham

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Oh I feel your pain :sweat_smile:

I am reasonably new to SV tours only joining in December last year after years of 360 photos. My first project was to try and SV tour a resort I was staying in. And oh the frustration. SV crashed after 10 photos and wouldn’t work so my LG 360 was on 2 second interval mode. I found every time I loaded more than 100 images in SV on any of my ancient devices the ram and cache limit would cause it to not respond at that critical moment just after spending an hour or two joining the dots. After much trial and error with emulators I found NOX. The biggest advantage is the ability to set Ram and Cpu and storage limits for the"device". I’ve set it to as my machine can cope with and it is much easier. Thanks for your suggestions on your finding I will most definitely check them out! :+1:

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