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Phones use MEMS sensors, which are much cheaper than laser gyros. I'm not sure if google maps uses the accelerometer, or just the GPS and compass. In my experi

Phones use MEMS sensors, which are much cheaper than laser gyros. I'm not sure if google maps uses the accelerometer, or just the GPS and compass. In my experience, phone maps work well if the device has a good GPS signal. It's just the compass that gives a shitty experience. I wish google would ignore the compass and just use GPS direction when you're moving. They used to do this, but now they seem to rely in the inherently crappy compass for direction.

jjoonathan 9y ago
> Phones use MEMS sensors, which are much cheaper than laser gyros Yes, but why? To my surface-level understanding, RLGs sound like they would be easier to integrate. > It's just the compass that gives a shitty experience. Yep, that's my experience too, and that's why I'd be ecstatic to hear that the compass was being replaced by a RLG (which could be re-locked to true North every time GPS got a decent movement vector). Then again, I half suspect that something is FUBAR'din the current compass stack. I have one of those fluxgate-magnetometer current probes at work and can report that everywhere I've used it I have seen magnetic field vary as a high-SNR continuous function of direction, yet my phone's maps app has a ton of lag, hysteresis, and jankiness when rotating in the same damn field. Maybe we just need to wait for the cheap compasses to get better.