can unity do this?

Hello,

I’m not a computer scientist so bare with me, i’m just trying to teach myself as I go…

I am wondering if Unity is the right thing for me.

I want to build a mobile app that that links hot spots on a 3d image to a data base. What I would like to be able to do is to zoom in to the image and for the hot spots to appear, but if the user is zoomed out the image will still be there but different options will be available, in a similar way to google earth.

In conjunction with the above I would like to use some iOS stye buttons to allow the user to access written information and maps (e.g. google earth) that would be permanently available throughout

Also if there’s anybody in the cambridge area (UK) who could tutor me I would be happy to pay for it.

Many thanks

 

yes

 

It's been so long but there is an asset in the asset store that integrates Google Maps with Unity if you search a bit in the asset store. There are also SQL assets in the asset store.

 

Why not just use Google Earth?

 

Oh, maybe for a case that a model in a game is holding a map and in that map is GoogleEarth / GoogleMap with a location of a GeoCache location. Say for example trying to make 4th Grade Science fun identifying trees and the teacher has put the locations of various local nearby tree species in Google Earth / maps while a smart phone app with a virtual guide takes them on the GeoCache tour of those try species. To complete they must bring back a leaf from each tree.

 

Reading comprehension people. He doesn't want Google Earth. He wants a similar interface where you can zoom in and out and have different options for different zoom levels that he is going to use with his own images.

It should be no problem in Unity depending on how much data you are dealing with. If your images are really large (too large to load in their entirety on a mobile device) it will complicate things--particularly in Unity Free which lacks some of the asynchronous loading functions.

You might need to purchase or write a plugin to hook in to your existing database, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem. The UI buttons will be much easier to do once Unity 4.6 is released with the new GUI framework if you don't have a right deadline. It should be available late summer, but I don't believe they have given any solid dates yet.

 

Uh, scolding folks for giving a reasonable answer to an ambiguous question isn't reading comprehension.

So what easier way than to search the Unity asset store package that already does similar with Google Maps as suggested? And he can sub-in his own map system of images or whatever those images are that he's wanting to zoom in on. There are a large collections of public ones nowadays.

Of course if he's wanting to sale that result then in the asset store it's a problem.

The code to read in a texture 2D image into Unity is about a paragraph and should be placed in a resources folder and named sensibly, as if they were indexed how your program needs to sort them according to different sort criteria.

The code to zoom in can be done several ways - hiding and unhiding 2D textures at different resolutions or placing on a plane and allow cameras to zoom in and zoom out or switching to different cameras at different 'zoom' levels...fetching from storage on the web...

You can make this work with openStreets.org for example with different POIs as hotspots and such for example.

There are lots of ways to do it (because you are basically talking UI presentation style and it's a matter of taste) but you want the fastest with the most highest resolution data possible that doesn't overwhelm a person's cheap Android clone phone or iPhone 4 probably.

And what if your system was using new uUI system itself as the presentation layer instead once 4.6 comes out and you treated your images as 'sprites'? Don't know if that will do quite what you're after but it's flexible and capable judging from the video I saw of uUI in another thread.