Flying FishViews Inc. (F2V) released the first-ever panoramic tour of a waterway in Texas – using an innovative approach for interacting with rivers, coasts and shores.
Spring Lake Mapping Project
Enabling Exploration, Research and Conservation
F2V’s digital maps (called FishViews) offer a unique perspective for navigating waterways online. Using street view-style panoramic imagery, collected from the surface of the water and fused with other location-specific information like water quality data, F2V delivers a comprehensive visual and data-driven experience that enables science, recreation and conservation. Available on the website F2V.me, the Spring Lake FishView tour shows F2V’s commitment to our waterways by demonstrating online access to digital maps of aquatic environments. (Go directly to the Spring Lake tour at: http://F2V.me/spring-lake.html)
F2V is a Seattle-based tech startup that spent the last 20 months developing technology to capture and present FishViews, a fresh way to tell the story of our rivers, coasts and shores. This new approach enables users to view and navigate within panoramic, water-level imagery. FishViews are captured thru HD photography on, over and under the water, and fused with concurrent measurements of the physical properties of the waterway – all synchronized by time and location. FishViews provide a rich, immersive browsing experience that enables greater understanding of a specific location or area.
Spring Lake, located in San Marcos TX, is an iconic pool fed by more than 200 underwater springs originating from the Edwards Aquifer. The lake is believed to be one of the longest continually inhabited sites in North America. Spear points found there provide archaeological evidence that humans have lived in the area surrounding Spring Lake for more than 12,000 years.
Thru the Spring Lake FishView tour, users can virtually float and snorkel the lake, with F2V-collected data and call outs to important physical and biological features. Also, navigation feature enhancements have been incorporated from inputs received following F2V’s release of a FishView tour of Washington state’s Elwha River in November 2014, showing F2V’s commitment to continuous improvement.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department have designated Spring Lake and the upper 3.8 miles of the San Marcos River headwaters as critical habitat for eight endangered species, such as the Texas blind salamander and Texas wild rice.
According to Scott Gallagher, F2V Co-Founder and former Airport Manager at San Marcos Municipal Airport, “Shane Townsend, Aaron Wallendorf and Taylor Heard of The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University were a great help in mapping Spring Lake and have since provided substantive inputs to help improve our product. I know that Texas State University and the City of San Marcos take great pride in Spring Lake and the San Marcos River, and we at F2V look forward to rolling out the San Marcos River tour early in 2015.”
F2V has created an innovative platform for gathering, understanding, and exchanging important information about the world’s most crucial natural resource: water.
– Shane Townsend, Sr. Program Advisor for Strategic Communications, The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment.
Look for FishViews of other rivers and waterways throughout Texas (like Lady Bird Lake in Austin) and around the US by signing up for updates on our website: F2V.me.