Real-time turn-by-turn navigation

[barbeau]

Someone recently brought this SDK to my attention:
http://developer.skobbler.com/#tour

It apparently includes the ability to do real-time turn-by-turn navigation. I don't know if its appropriate for integration with OTP Android as I haven't been able to check it out in detail. My first impression is that it throws you out of the app into theirs, which isn't what we're looking for (we could do the same with Google Maps). But, we should take a look.

[barbeau]

I got feedback from another developer that real-time nav in Skobbler isn't as good as it appears - however, I don't have any personal experience with it to date.

[barbeau]

I'd like to see our implementation use JSR293 Location API 2.0 as the main interface design. We used this interface design with our TAD mobile app, and it worked well.

[barbeau]

Part of this is notifying the user in real-time when they should exit the vehicle, which has its own ticket at #415.

[barbeau]

Just had a conversation with @ecgreb, and he mentioned that Mapzen has a project for turn-by-turn directions called "On the road". This currently acts as a Java client to get directions from Open-Source Routing Machine (OSRM), and handles client side location correction, snapping the client's location to the road.

We should definitely look at using the "On the road" engine, and possibly contributing to that project, when we implement real-time navigation in OTP Android.

Note that the current "On the road" project doesn't currently provide any UI control (e.g., controlling the map camera based on real-time location and path) - that is something we could possibly implement and contribute back to that project for others to use as well. Mapzen currently has a project called Tangram ES which will hopefully (maybe next year) become a drop-in replacement for Google Maps API v2, so that's something to watch in terms of UI control. Ideally UI control would be fairly implementation agnostic so that it could work with Tangram, Google Maps API v2, etc. without changes to the app.

[barbeau]

MapBox has an SDK for this now too:
https://www.mapbox.com/navigation-sdk/