Peak Finder

Use the peak finder button to show a 3D display of the topography with hills and mountains identified. If you choose the view from your current location then you can overlay the image over the view through your camera lens. Launch the peak finder from the ‘Go To’ coordinates box, and look for the camera icon. The view will be based on the location in the coordinates box. To set the coordinates to your current location tap the ‘My Location’ button, or to reset the coordinates to the map focus tap on ‘Map Center’

The peak finder display has a number of controls. Use the close button to close the display. The altitude control is used to change the view from ground level (what you see through your camera) and a view from 2500m above ground level. The manual control is used to fix the position of the profile on the screen so that you can manually scroll the display to align with the camera image, or just to visualise the surrounding terrain without moving the camera (on phones without a magnetic compass sensor, manual mode is always engaged). The transparency slider is used to make the camera image more or less visible behind the peak finder display. The Peak Filter control hides close peaks so that you can see labels for peaks in the distance that may be obscured.

If you set the view location to be your current location then you can match the profile to the view you see through the camera to identify peaks in your field of view. The peak finder works by calculating the direction your camera is facing from the compass and orientation sensors in your phone. The compass sensor in particular will have some degree of inaccuracy and it is likely that the peaks and topography displayed doesn’t exactly match the camera image. This is normal. It is also possible that the compass reading can be very inaccurate – it is important to understand how to calibrate and use your compass to get the best results. See the compass use guide in the help files on this site for further info. The manual alignment mode can also be used to more accurately align the camera view if you wish.

The peaks displayed are ones that are calculated to be visible from your current location based on the ground level topography. The peaks are selected from the list of placenames included in the NZTopo50 map and classified as ‘Hills’ by LINZ. This includes mountain peaks as well as smaller named hills. In some cases there may be a lot of peaks displayed in a small area, in which case only the labels for the closest peaks will be readable.

The topography profile that is drawn is calculated from the digital elevation model data in the app. It is a set of elevations on an 32m grid, so features smaller than this will not be reliably described.