Hiking and rambling have become increasingly popular in recent years. In the U.S., as of 2016, there are over 42 million hikers, up from 29 million in 2006. This increased interest in the activity isn’t confined to the U.S. however, with 26 percent of Britons saying they’ve taken a hiking trip, at some stage, in the country.
ViewRanger is a free smartphone app that is seeking to appeal to this ever-growing audience of hikers. The newest version of the app, which is paired with the Apple Watch Series 3, is able to pinpoint your exact location, while highlighting 10 hiking routes that you can choose to take, from this initial location. These maps can also be downloaded offline too, if a user will be visiting an area with poor internet reception.
Once a user has chosen a specific route, it is downloaded to the smartwatch and ViewRanger, relying on GPS technology, provides a guide around this trail, with the ability to zoom in and out of a map too. If a user strays off in the wrong direction, they’ll receive alerts and instructions on how to get back on track. In addition to this, the app also records a user’s statistics, such as speed, distance and time, which can be shared with friends.
Users can download more than 150,000 interactive trail guides, based off routes from 23 countries, including Britain, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Italy. For those travelling to quite remote areas, using the BuddyBeacon feature, means a user’s location can be shared amongst a selected group of people, who can follow progress on a hike.
The app has augmented reality (AR) technology integrated also, for a feature called Skyline, which the makers say can identify up to nine million points in territories across the world. It uses an iPhone’s camera to identify and label specific parts of a landscape, within a radius of 20 miles and overlays waypoints and navigation arrows onto the actual landscape from the camera.
The newest version of the app does work with all models of Apple Watch, when paired to an iPhone via Bluetooth, but does also work independently from the iPhone when using a built-in cellular connection on the Apple Watch Series 3.
To date, the app’s creators have built up a relationship with Apple. Most recently, it was announced that ViewRanger was the only third-party app that Apple included in its gift guide for the Apple Watch Series 3 this holiday season. Previously, Lead Developer at ViewRanger, Hannah Catmur, spoke at the Apple Watch Keynote event too.
In a statement, relating to its launch, ViewRanger CEO Craig Wareham commented: “The Apple Watch Series 3’s built-in cellular connection, when combined with our new smartwatch app, makes it incredibly simple to discover adventure wherever you are in the world. We work with a huge list of expert route publishers, plus millions of explorers who upload and share their adventures in the ViewRanger app every day, and our latest Watch app makes discovering those routes more accessible than ever before.”
