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Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind
- drats 14y agoOnly in the hyperventilating startup bubble world can tracking people around a shopping mall with wifi be cooler than tracking your position anywhere on earth with satellites that were put there by huge rockets.
- mortenjorck 14y agoI also get the feeling the author has never heard of differential GPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS Which actually leads to something I've wondered about before: Why couldn't you (with appropriate FCC clearance) set up GPS transceivers around a shopping mall calibrated to rebroadcast the signal at the appropriate time offset? It would work with everyone's existing hardware and be completely transparent.
- mrsebastian 14y agoDifferential GPS doesn't work indoors, I thought? The main problem is that wireless signals simply aren't reliable. You could "boost" GPS indoors, but that doesn't get around the fact that there are corners, concrete walls, mirrors, humans, and so on. Anyway, we're splitting hairs. The point is that we don't currently have an IPS. It doesn't matter if we extend GPS to work indoors or use other signals to create an IPS -- the point is, we need to create an IPS :)
- joshu 14y agoiirc there are several short-range positioning signals (various flavors of differential GPS, i guess)
- 7952 14y agoGPS is complex and I may be wrong. But for rebroadcast to work the transceiver would need to be placed exactly between the user and the satellite in space; meaning a different location every time the user moves. If not perfectly placed; the radio signal will have travelled further than expected and give the wrong position. I suppose you could attempt to locally recreate GPS signals with multiple transmitters; but this would play havoc with GPS reception outside the building. Why not just use WIFI? Differential GPS is not about rebroadcasting the actual GPS position, but the error from a known position. This allows the device to enumerate the error caused by atmospheric effects.
- modeless 14y agoThe location of each GPS transmitter must be known exactly for the triangulation to work, and existing GPS receivers know nothing about the location of shopping-mall transmitters. They only know about satellites. So that's why you couldn't do this with existing receivers, but I don't know of any reason why you couldn't make new receivers that cooperate with a new type of ground-based transmitter built into cell towers or similar. Multipath might be a problem but it seems surmountable. Do any radio experts here know why nobody has done anything like this for cell phones? (The Wi-Fi/Bluetooth positioning talked about in the article is based solely on signal strength which is far inferior to the GPS method).
- archivator 14y agoI don't think the GPS approach can work with ground stations - what GPS has going for it is line-of-sight to the satellites. Multipath would be a hell of an issue in an urban environment. That said, here's a paper describing various positioning methods - http://emits.esa.int/emits-doc/1-5200-RD25-Signal-processing-techniques-network-aided-positioning.pdf http://emits.esa.int/emits-doc/1-5200-RD25-Signal-processing... EOTD looks rather interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-OTD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-OTD
- jf271 14y agoWAAS is a combination of GPS and ground stations. It is accurate to about 6 feet. Widely used in aviation.
- modeless 14y agoThe ground stations don't transmit to your device. WAAS still needs the satellite signals to work and so won't help indoor reception problems.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoCorrect. The ground reference stations multiplex their data to the WAAS satellite, which then pushes the data on WAAS-specific channels (hence, why your GPS receiver specifically needs to be built to support WAAS)
- smackfu 14y ago"Unlike GPS and GLONASS, there isn’t a standard way of building an indoor positioning system. " I don't really get it then. So Broadcom built some sensors into its latest GPS chip, but what standard is it using to get a location from them?
- chrisa 14y agoThere isn't a standard yet; wifi locationing currently requires a site survey to gather location data. It's potentially possible to crowdsource this data, but currently indoor location tracking has nothing like a GPS standard – each site is different.
- technogarden 14y agoI cannot wait for this to get some adoption! I love augmented reality, but the current state-of-the-art is not exactly suited for AR applications. If this chip can deliver on its promises, I think we'll see an explosion in AR as it finally starts to look real. The main problem with AR on mobile devices as I see it is a visual one - very intense jitter due to inaccurate GPS and gyroscope data. If IPS can pinpoint AR objects not based on visual markers or inaccurate GPS, then I think we are quickly headed into Dennou Coil territory. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil)
- pirateking 14y agoI too cannot wait for true AR. I have been dreaming about making AR apps for the iPhone since it was released, but have never found satisfactory solutions to the positioning issues. Can't wait to play a real world RPG, with GPS used for the world map, and IPS for dungeons with AR objects accurately placed. (Just started Dennou Coil. It rules.)
- jarek 14y agoGPS categorically does not "only really operate in two dimensions." You get altitude above mean sea level as part of the standard GPS reading.
- dholowiski 14y agoThe article claims that " GPS and GLONASS can measure altitude, but generally the data is inaccurate and too low-resolution (on the order of 10-25 meters" - which I'm fairly sure is totally un-true.
- sern 14y agoNo, it's true. The possible geometry of visible GPS satellites at any given moment (namely that they're all above you and none are below) means that the vertical error is pretty bad in comparison to the horizontal error.
- runjake 14y agoGPS altitude readings seemed pretty fine on the numerous mountains I've climbed. I almost always cross-checked with a calibrated barometric altimeter.
- dholowiski 14y agoInteresting. I wonder if the altitude readings were WAAS augmented, or if this is a case where theory doesn't translate in to reality.
- runjake 14y agoAh. You may be right, there. WAAS is enabled on my GPS (a Garmin 60CSx). Link for bystanders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waas WAAS uses a network of ground-based reference stations, in North America and Hawaii, to measure small variations in the GPS satellites' signals in the western hemisphere. Measurements from the reference stations are routed to master stations, which queue the received Deviation Correction (DC) and send the correction messages to geostationary WAAS satellites in a timely manner (every 5 seconds or better). Those satellites broadcast the correction messages back to Earth, where WAAS-enabled GPS receivers use the corrections while computing their positions to improve [3D] accuracy.
- abruzzi 14y agoOne more piece of 'revolutionary technology' whose main goal seems to be to sell me things or make me spend my money in other ways.
- billybob 14y agoThis would be nice if it let me find the spaghetti noodles more quickly in an unfamiliar grocery store. But somehow I doubt the store is going to install a bunch of tech to help me shop more quickly. If they wanted to do that, they could just all put stuff in the same place.
- jedahan 14y agoCheck out what the MONA has done in conjunction with Art Processors http://mona.net.au/theo/ http://mona.net.au/theo/ to completely get rid of tombstones inside a museum. Harder to do here at the Met, but there are most definitely applications that aren't about spending more money.
- baddox 14y agoWhen did commerce become a bad thing?
- abruzzi 14y agoCommerce isn't a bad thing, but exciting new technology to try to separate me from my money faster may be a cool thing for Google, but not for me--the consumer. Maybe I'm weird, but I already know what I want to buy, I don't need technology to try (and usually fail) to generate some new consumption desire.
- skore 14y agoBe honest though - it's not like companies like to develop technology that has no commercial value. Whether or not it's used in that way is a different question, but if it's a big company developing something, you bet it went through twenty levels of market research to make sure there is a buck to make at the other end. It's still your choice what you do with it once the technology gets to you. I find it far more fruitful to look at what people do with the technology and how they end up screwing themselves with it. And by fruitful I mean frustrating.
- shpoonj 14y agoNothing pertaining to shopping malls and consumerism has ever or will ever blow my mind. Sorry I'm not sorry. Can we get back to using our powers for good now?
- jedahan 14y agoJust because the article shows examples of how that tech is applied to consumerism doesn't mean thats all IPS is limited to. I'm sure you can think of many applications that are not solely to make more money.
- shpoonj 14y agoYou're right... it could also be used to oppress people.
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- ChuckMcM 14y agoAs a robotics hobbyist I've done a lot of research into the 'localization' problem (which for robot folks is localizing where you are relative to the space around you). And there are lots of ways to do it, some more interesting than others. The simplest being landmark navigation. Sebastian Thrun of the self driving car fame did some interesting graduate work in Germany where a robot uses the doorways to figure out what room it was in and then could navigate to any other room. However what some people fail to realize is that stores really don't want this technology to exist. You see they, like Casinos and other places with 'impulse actions' want you to wander around looking for your target and being exposed to various other temptations. How much less per shopper would you imagine there would be if a shopper had a pre-planned route available for the three things they needed at a Target or a Walmart? A really simple solution would be to program the ceiling of a place into an app. When you're looking at your phone, its front facing camera can look past you to the ceiling and figure out where you are. Roboticists have known for a while that ceilings are remarkably good navigation references, try as you might they are often quite different to the discerning camera.
- minikites 14y ago"Roboticists have known for a while that ceilings are remarkably good navigation references, try as you might they are often quite different to the discerning camera." Would this work in an absolute sense, providing absolute location, or in a relative sense, like an optical mouse, sampling the ceiling and comparing each sample to the previous?
- pointernil 14y agoWhy not? I guess the features would have to be large/visible enough to be picked up by the camera. For initialization some kind of qr-codes could be placed wihtin the relative positioning patterns...
- stonemetal 14y agoIt ought to be good enough for absolute position. The general arrangement of lights, air vent, smoke alarm, sprinkler, motion detector, and wall proximity are more than likely unique.
- excuse-me 14y agoWe had this nearly 25years ago. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/ab.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/ab.html It was vaguely useful for finding your supervisor - assuming he a) actually turned up at the lab and b) remembered his badge
- maeon3 14y agoA cool system would be a tool to find the location of a point relative to the sun. So I can whip out my smartphone while in the asteroid belt and have an intuitive metric system to identify any point in our solar system.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoYou'd need at least two more points of reference, I think, in order for this to be effective. By itself, a picture of the sun (and I'm assuming it's an incredibly clear picture taken with a magical instrument) would only tell you how far away from the sun you were. With an additional known point (and an accurate date and time), you'd know where you were within a circle around the line between those two points. That might actually be good enough for a rough estimate, if you can assume that you're in the plane of the solar system.
- cmcewen 14y agoThis can also be done by using LEDs and smartphone cameras, which actually gives a higher resolution. http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39685/ http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39685/
- seldo 14y ago"Roving groups of attenuating meatbags" as a synonym for "people" is my new favourite phrase.
- trafficlight 14y agoSounds like something out of a Neal Stephenson novel.
- cypherpunks01 14y agoI was desperately hoping this would be "Interstellar Positioning System", and not something that tracks people around in shopping malls.
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoThere were recent stories about using pulsars in an interstellar positioning system.
- toomuchtodo 14y agohttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17557581 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17557581
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- 54mf 14y agoThink wi-fi is cool? Sky-fi will blow your mind! It's just like wi-fi, only it uses satellites instead of terrestrial nodes for communication. That is to say, my main problem with IPS is that it sounds like GPS, but isn't at all the same. One is a massive global satellite network, and the other is glorified RFID with a hefty glob of marketing on top. Call it something else, at least, please?
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