Sneak Peek - The New Calculator

JH
John Honovich
Sep 19, 2015
IPVM

Now upload floor plans and add your own markups to the map.

We have taken our industry leading outdoor google mapping software and enhanced it with powerful new tools for indoor camera coverage and more detailed designs.

Try it out.

This gif shows a little of what you can now do:

In addition, you can add circles, shapes, lines and labels plus color them as you desire.

Try out the new calculator now with the sample simple project shown above.

The official announcement is this Wednesday and we'll spend the next few days improving the new features as you tell us what you want.

Let us know what you think and what else you want us to do!

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Billy Guthrie
Sep 19, 2015

Great addition!

Maybe a feature that is in the works, but would be nice to be able to import a floor plan, select 2 points and add a manual measurement for business districts and residential neighborhoods under development; Google will take a bit to get updated maps for those areas.

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JH
John Honovich
Sep 19, 2015
IPVM

Billy, thanks!

We can do that, we just need to figure out the best way to show it. Calculating distances between points is simple on Google Maps because each point has a lat / long which allows for straightforward distance calculation.

You'll notice we already show distance for cameras:

What if we add distance display for lines? As you drew a line in real time, we would display what its current distance was and if you hovered over it, it would show the distance as well?

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Billy Guthrie
Sep 19, 2015

John,

I may not have explained myself very well, I apologize! Yes, I was aware of the distance already available. That is what I used to scale a floor plan down; however, it was a bit humbug. The idea would be to import the floor plan and automatically scale down based on the measurement of two points on a floor plan. I typically use the doorway, as most are roughly 3 feet. Hope this helps!

Aloha!

JH
John Honovich
Sep 20, 2015
IPVM

Billy,

Thanks!

We'll think over the best way to handle this. It won't be available for the release this Wednesday but we'll consider it for later in the year.

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Billy Guthrie
Sep 20, 2015

John,

on the roadmap is just fine; is what I expected anyway!

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Mark Jones
Sep 20, 2015

Best Christmas gift ever!! I have a meeting with a client on Tuesday, he is going to go nuts over this.

Simply Rightous John. Thanks to everyone.

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Marc Pichaud
Sep 20, 2015

I like the tool for quick outdoor simulations - always close to roads -, but when trying to see indoor outlets only in 2D , it's very very basic, - the camera view keeps on using outdoor street views through the walls. (might be the next step?) Also, I have already been working on some views that were not covered by google street, so completely blind, and JVSG was definitely the best tool to display more complex indoor & outdoor FoV

Anyhow this calculator is simple and powerful for quick outdoor displays and avoid boom lift to take pictures by using the world's largest street view database, I like it.

JH
John Honovich
Sep 20, 2015
IPVM

"the camera view keeps on using outdoor street views through the walls. (might be the next step?)"

You can upload your own scenes / views.

JH
John Honovich
Sep 20, 2015
IPVM

Also, we have 8 stock scenes to pick from, including indoor ones like doorway, hallway, indoor room and lobby:

We are going to default to indoor room for cameras that are placed inside of a floorplan.

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Marc Pichaud
Sep 20, 2015

Thanks John. You're right it does answer if you have picture. Great

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Marc Pichaud
Sep 20, 2015

Oups, Any attempt to type FOv = 360° crashes the dipslay (Sorry, I'm fond of outdoor 360° 4K to cover close front/back perimeters along building)

JH
John Honovich
Sep 20, 2015
IPVM

I can't reproduce. Are you doing something like below or?

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Marc Pichaud
Sep 20, 2015

yes . I force the Angle of view to 360 but then I get a generic 360 fisheye view by default and cant' get any more a google street view. Have to quit project and relaunch

JH
John Honovich
Sep 20, 2015
IPVM

Understood now and reproduced. Will fix.

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Rob Hammond
Sep 21, 2015
IPVMU Certified

John, Just to add my vote Billy's request to import drawings and have some way of scaling them in the application. Typically we are working with buildings that have not been built, or dealing with rooms within rooms. I would love to import my whole project into this app to show clients what they can expect from our design.

Kudos to your team for a easy to use and imaginative application!

JH
John Honovich
Sep 21, 2015
IPVM

Next week, we are going to add in 'auto scaling' of uploaded floorplans. Thanks Rob and Billy.

Here is what we plan to improve this week:

  • if a camera is over a floorpan, display the indoor room scene instead of the default intersection; this will be more realistic for most users
  • right clicking on a floorpan only allows for deleting the floorpan, allow the add camera here, center map here and view all cameras to be displayed
  • display the length of the line markup in feet / meters as appropriate when the line is selected (a poor man's way to measure distance
  • if there is a rectangle, shape or circle in the viewport, allow super zoom, so building one's own floorplan on the map from scratch is easier
  • allow locking / unlocking the floor plan and camera positioning (a few members have asked about this for designs that get more complex).

Let us know what else you want. Thanks again for the feedback!

JH
John Honovich
Sep 26, 2015
IPVM

Update. We have a number of improvements this week.

Also, we plan to roll out the auto-scale feature next week and then do the formal announcement the Monday after next.

Here's the main things we improved this week:

  • Now, you can lock floor plans and cameras. This is useful when you have cameras over flooplans or multiple cameras side by side.
  • Now, you can super zoom into markups so you can more precisely put cameras on rectangles, circles, etc.
  • Now, distance is displayed on lines so you can better measure / check distances either for cable runs, floorplans, etc. Example:

  • Now, you can use right click to directly add cameras over / on a floorplan

Once we get the auto-scale of floorplans working next week, I think this will be pretty polished.

One thing no one has mentioned yet is buildings with multiple floors. We do plan to support this in the future so wondering how critical it is to anyone.

JH
John Honovich
Oct 05, 2015
IPVM

Auto scaling of floorplans is now live. You can try it out on the calculator. Below is what the process looks like:

Now you can get the right scale for your floorplan and then put your floorplan wherever you want, knowing the scale is accurate.

Please let us know what you think.

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Mark Jones
Oct 06, 2015

Really excellent work to everyone at IPVM and beyond.

John, are there any plans to make a more cohesive video of all of the features that have been added to the Calculator? They are coming in leaps and bounds.

Thanks again.

JH
John Honovich
Oct 06, 2015
IPVM

Mark, thanks!

Yes, we plan to do a complete new training video series later this week. We have one more notable addition that is being rolled out later today - a master Camera list that provides easier navigation and editing. Once that is live, we'll film the videos.

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Mark Jones
Oct 06, 2015

Thanks John. Again, excellent work. I can see that I am not the only one thinking about improvements to what we offer.

JH
John Honovich
Oct 10, 2015
IPVM

The camera list feature is now live. It displays the total number of cameras in your a project, a scrollable list of cameras in the project and convenience links to go to, edit, delete and lock each camera.

See below:

The camera list is especially useful for those with dozens or hundreds of cameras to better navigate and edit their cameras.

We also improved how we do labels, making the background resizable, like so:

Finally, we fixed a half dozen minor bugs. If you see anything else, just comment here and let us know. This ends the current development run on markups and floorplans. We'll be continuing to add other features to the calculator but we now will be focusing on the mobile app.

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