Hacker News Reader

Comment by leoc | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering when Google (or someone else) is going to do the same thing for pedestrian routes and locations. There are plenty of highly-trafficked places where GPS is unavailable or not precise enough, and mapping WiFi stations evidently isn't enough to fill the gap. Of course the problem could, and should, be attacked by ground-based radio systems * , but 100% coverage by such systems certainly won't arrive anytime soon, and it wouldn't be like the tech companies to wait for it. You would have to take your phone out to get a location fix ... but that likely won't be the case whenever AR glasses really start to appear in public, and the techcos will also be happy to stick cameras on your clothes and luggage if they and you can get away with it.

* Come on Transport for London, it's high time to show some leadership here.

View on HN

Niantic's Ingress kind of demo'd an early approach to this idea of pedestrians doing map data collection -- http://simplify360.com/blog/ingress-how-google-is-gamifying-...

Quote: > The game is always prompting the player about his location. In this regard, Michael Carney from PandoDaily said, “To capture a Portal, and harvest the “energy” contained therein for his respective team, a user must physically go to a location and check in. additional energy is available by travelling specific walking paths, bike paths, and inner-city routes dictated by the company, all while the user’s Android device is transmitting GPS and accelerometer data. In some cases, the user will be required to photograph locations or objects along those routes.”

Quite literally trading magic beans to punters, noice. For high-value pedestrian-only areas it would also be quite viable to send out Google employees or gig-workers. Likely with dedicated hardware, which wouldn't have to be very big or alarming: a consumer WinMR headset is already doing a first approximation of the kind of scanning you'd want.

They announced something for this at IO last year: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/google-has-an-indoor-posit...

Aha, thanks! Time to start the countdown to self-driving suitcases so.

You mean like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5UptQx1g3s

Learning how to look at a map, look at your surroundings, and then look back at the map to figure out where you are is apparently a lost art.

Do you primarily mean high density walking areas, or essentially everywhere that you can freely walk as a pedestrian?

Naturally you'd prioritise things like all the exits from major metro stations in tier-1 cities. Further down the curve, if it's viable to maintain a map of every public vehicular road in the USA then it would surely be similarly viable to map all the major public streets and squares in the centres of the world's tier-1 cities; likewise the major public interior spaces in their public-transport buildings. So that's your MVP; then obviously you'd go as far further down the long tail as technology and business make viable (and regulation permits).

Basically it's just a combination of the SLAM tracking being successfully used already in VR and AR headsets like Windows "MR" and Oculus' Santa Cruz with the usual data-consolidating ways of Larry's Basilisk. I have a suspicion this may be the intended final purpose of all the nice Project Tango research.

Obviously you could also use the database for things like photo location-tagging. Similarly, smartphone car navigation apps would want to be able to be able to use the data being collected for self-driving cars, too. You could also imagine self-driving street-sweepers taking advantage of the pedestrian-area data (or indeed helping to harvest it).

In Europe in particular (and I'm sure elsewhere) a lot of pedestrian areas are very narrow. The lack of precision is a big problem. I have not had same number of issues in the US presumably because so many pedestrian areas were built with cars in mind (at least at first).

Or just avoiding roads with no sidewalk. This has improved by sometimes Google still wants to send me via roads that are not suitable for pedestrians.

Interestingly it's the opposite for cyclists. There, Google chooses "quiet" routes, sometimes sending me via paths where cycling isn't allowed. Could be a London mapping issue though.

High density, high intersection pedestrian areas. I’ve gotten so lost in Japan metros before, for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com