When calibrating Insolation AR, the best approach is simply to check the alignment of the virtual sun with the real sun.

However, there are times when the sun may not be visible, e.g.

• A cloudy day
• Before or after sunrise/sunset
• If you're in a building that has no windows facing the sun at that moment

In these situations, you can use the map to check calibration and do any manual adjustment that may be necessary.

Reading the map

If you hold your device near horizontal, you will see a 'floating' map showing the surrounding area of your current location. The map is oriented so that if you face north (or more specifically, what your device thinks is true north) the map will 'read' the right way up, i.e. the map labels won't be upside down or at an odd angle.

To check calibration with the map you just need to confirm that it agrees with your physical surroundings - does it align with what you see around you?

If not, the guided calibration process will instruct you to move the device in a figure-of-eight motion to reset the compass, or to calibrate manually by dragging left of right to adjust the compass offset until everything lines up as expected.

Tips and tricks

If you find it tricky to know if the map is aligned correctly, here's a trick that can help: look for straight lines in your surroundings and find them on the map to compare. Here's an example:

Here, we're looking out of the window of a property in Florence, Italy. As it is a medieval city, the streets are not aligned with a standard map grid (N/S/E/W). Also, we can't turn to face north as there are no north facing windows in the apartment, so we have to view the map when it is rotated, making it slightly harder to read.

However, by identifying the street below on the map, you can see fairly easily that it is not in perfect alignment with the physical surroundings - the blue lines (added) are not quite parallel to each other.

We can correct that either by recalibrating the compass (figure-of-eight for a few seconds), or, if that does not fix the misalignment, by manually dragging left or right to bring things into alignment. Here's the result of a manual adjustment that lines things up nicely: