New Projects - Fresh from the Labs

This is definitely one of the most original and niche projects I've come across—and those two qualities are almost bound to get projects included in this section! gipfel has a unique application for mountain images and plotting. According to the Web site:

gipfel provides some amazing geological information when you position just two mountains.

Installation

A source tarball is available on the Web site, and trawling around the Net, I found a package from the ancient wonderland of Debian. But, the package is just as old and beardy as its parent OS. Installing gipfel's source is a pretty basic process, so I went with the tarball. Once the contents are extracted and you have a terminal open in the new directory, it needs only the usual:

$ ./configure
$ make

And, as sudo or root:

# make install

However, like most niche projects, it does have a number of slightly obscure requirements that probably aren't installed on your system (the configure script will inform you). The Web site gives the following requirements:

I found I needed to install fltk-1.1-dev and libgsl0-dev to get past ./configure (you probably need the -dev package for libtiff installed too, but I already had that installed from a previous project). Once compilation has finished and the install script has done its thing, you can start the program with:

$ gipfel

Usage

Once you're inside, the first thing you'll need to do is load a picture of mountains (and a word of warning, it only accepts .jpg files, so convert whatever you have if it isn't already a .jpg). Once the image is loaded, you either can choose a viewpoint from a predefined set of locations, such as Everest Base Camp and so on, or enter the coordinates manually. However, I couldn't wrap my head around the interface for manual entry, and as Johannes Hofmann says on his own page:

As a result, Johannes recommends the Web site www.alpin-koordinaten.de as a great place for getting GPS locations, but bear in mind that the site is in German, und mein Deutsch ist nicht so gut, so you may need to run a Web translator.

If you're lucky enough to get a range of reference points appearing on your image, you can start to manipulate where they land on your picture according to perspective, as overwhelming chance dictates that the other mountain peaks won't line up immediately and, therefore, will require tweaking.

If you look at the controls, such as the compass bearing, focal length, tilt and so on, these will start to move the reference points around while still connecting them as a body of points. Provided you have the right coordinates for your point of view, the reference points should line up, along with information on all the other peaks with it (which is really what the project is for in the first place).

gipfel also has an image stitching mode, which allows you to generate panoramic images from multiple images that have been referenced with gipfel. As my attempts with gipfel didn't turn out so well, I include a shot of Johannes' stunning results achieved from Lempersberg to Zugspitze in the Bavarian Alps, as well as one of the epic panoramic shots as shown on the Web site. Although this project is still a bit unwieldy, it is still in development, and you have to hand it to gipfel, it is certainly original.

Also included in gipfel is the ability to stitch several images together for amazing panoramic shots like this.