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Point your camera at a landscape to learn about its geology

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I've been working on a fun little app that paints geologic maps over landscapes using augmented reality. You can use it to identify what the mapped rocks are, read descriptions about them, and view the earth as it looked when they formed by turning back the continent positions. It spun out of some augmented reality work I was doing on my other side project app - Flyover Country, which tells you about the view from the airplane window.I'm in Minnesota, so i haven't had a chance to test it on a huge amount of terrain (the best I've found is the Mississippi River gorge in the twin cities... I need a trip up north), so anyone that's somewhere with some more bumps: please help!).It's stuck in the Apple review queue, but it's up on testflight for anyone interested. Google approved it quickly and it's fully out on android (links to both on the marketing site).edit: got a report that testflight was asking for an install code. Seems like a testflight app issue, but dismissing it and installing as normal seems to work!

HN · launched Oct 29, 2026 · 250 upvotes (top 3%) · 0 views

Niche: interactive mapping platforms · 191 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Education
  • Agent / copilot
  • B2C
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial The AR camera overlay and app UI are buildable, but accurate geologic map data for arbitrary locations and the plate-reconstruction 'turn back time' feature need geoscience datasets and expertise that vibe coding cannot supply.

What it would actually take: Pair an AR framework (ARKit/ARCore or a cross-platform AR SDK) with geolocation and an offline map tile pipeline. The hard parts are licensing and processing national geologic map datasets (e.g., USGS/state surveys) into polygon layers, and building paleogeographic plate-reconstruction models that need geoscience and GIS expertise to be accurate.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Backseat Geologist, flyovercountry.app

Concerns raised: Device can't run the required motion tracking, App not appearing in Play Store search, Subheading reads as AI-generated

Feature requests: Data layer overlay atop the geologic unit map, ASTER and LANDSAT mineralogy overlays on geologic units, LLM-based narration mode for roadside geology while driving

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 242 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #11 of 243 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 365 days after the earliest competitor.

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