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from the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIJBUZm1HoY dept.
When it comes to telling someone an address, words beat numbers and letters.
One company is betting that using words to designate a location might be a whole lot easier and quicker in a digital world than using Longitude and Latitude or street addresses. While their system seems unlikely to be widely adopted it does have a certain appeal when combined with a smartphone. Passing addresses to drivers on the road (or friends for a party) can be kind of tricky. Unless you can send it electronically, the chances of remembering a spoken address is slim, and remembering longitude and latitude long enough to write it down or key it into your GPS is zero.
However remembering browser.tapes.outing or limbs.pinning.honk is pretty easy. You don't even have to write them down. Hint: click satellite view to see what those places have in common. You can keep three words in your head long enough to key them into an app, and zoom directly to the address on your smart phone.
The system was developed by What3Words and is already being used in Geographical Information Systems, and other earth mapping applications where there aren't convenient ways to exchange geo-coordinates verbally.
what3words is a universal addressing system based on a 3mx3m global grid.
Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address.
Their geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses & vice-versa.
Using words means non-technical people can find any location accurately and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.
People's ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect whilst your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes, that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.
The company says "We want to give everyone in the world the ability to talk about a precise location as easily as possible." (And by "Give" they mean "Sell".)
There are free Android and iOS apps available from Navmii allowing users to navigate using a simple 3 word address.
Will it catch on? Betteridge says no, but if Google or Apple takes an interest it might become "a thing".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dr Ippy on Monday November 02 2015, @11:51AM
As a walker, I like to visit places in the countryside that have no generally recognised name.
I would find this system useful.
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(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @12:02PM
Shill.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday November 02 2015, @02:09PM
You mean zombie shill.
That or Chuck Norris's character Walker, Texas Ranger. In that case, I'd apologize. Quickly.
(Score: 2, Funny) by kazzie on Monday November 02 2015, @02:19PM
Are you from Somalia?
anonymous.speaks.online [what3words.com]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday November 02 2015, @04:17PM
Must be a Somali Pirate.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Monday November 02 2015, @12:32PM
It seems useful for that but I am not sure why it is any better than what we use today. How would you know the 3-word location? Because somebody told you or you had to look it up. Either way, you would need to query somebody (and they probably would show you a map) or some database or map to find the 3-word location. In that case, you might as well use the existing system since they both involve consulting maps. It just seems to me that this is trying to solve a problem that is not actually a problem. I once was verbally given got some really odd, but astonishingly accurate, directions to somebody's house:
"You are going to turn right at the 7-11. Don't turn at the 7-11 you want to turn at. That 7-11 is there to thwart you. Keep driving. You need to drive until you think you have driven too far, then drive a little bit more and then turn at the 7-11."
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @01:13PM
The counterexample is some (mostly Germanic descendant) areas of the country will have roads with over ten names. Its not unusual for a physical slab of asphalt to run thru multiple small political municipalities all with different street names, and have a state highway designation name, and a county highway name. Believe it or not the feds sometimes play a part when a section of "state route number WTF" runs temporarily over a stretch of interstate highway due to construction or something.
This can be confusing as hell for non-locals and even navigation systems. "So I'm trying to figure out how to turn onto state hwy 33 from county road A and all I know is I'm on Aspen Lane in WTF-ville" and it turns out all those names are the same road.
Naturally the best solution to having 89 million shitty overlapping "standards" is to add another new, even bigger "standard".
(Score: 3, Informative) by iamjacksusername on Monday November 02 2015, @02:05PM
Haha yeah I have a road by me that, for about 2 miles, has 4 different state and local numbers.
The relevant XKCD standards link: https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jcross on Monday November 02 2015, @02:10PM
Exactly, and the new standard is even worse, because the place name changes entirely every 3 meters. Playing around with the map, there seems to be no coherence whatsoever between adjacent grid squares, and thus no way to know that two 3-word addresses are next to each other without converting them to a more coherent system. This is probably good for the company selling the mapping/unmapping service, but an inconvenience to most everyone else. What it probably is good for is telling a taxi driver where to take you, but then again, slurring your words a bit when drunk could land you in Outer Elbonia with a hell of a fare.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:50PM
It's designed that way on purpose. Having "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" next to "Purple Monkey Dishes" could lead to unintended errors. By having a completely different names, one is quite sure that a person meant this 3m x 3m spot and not the other 3m x 3m right next to it.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:57PM
That's what I figured too, but it doesn't necessarily reduce errors unless you know roughly where the location is supposed to be. For instance, say "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" and "Purple Monkey Dishes" both exist, and one is in my hometown and the other is across the world. If I'm telling one to a taxi driver it will be pretty obvious if I've got the wrong one, but if I put it on a package to mail it would not be. At the same time, if my house is 10 meters wide, it might have 4 legitimate addresses, all entirely different, and that's just counting the ones on the street frontage. One isn't always interested in 3 meter accuracy, and the situation gets even worse if my address resolves to an apartment building and I live on the 4th floor.
Where the old tradition of named estates still exists, there actually are three word addresses, although not with 3 meter accuracy of course. I know a person whose entire address is in the form , County , Ireland. Basically just three words, but the neat part is you can get some basic information about where it is without looking it up. In other words, the scheme has a transparent hierarchy which this new one lacks.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:58PM
Whoops, my angle brackets got eaten. It should have been "(Estate), County (Name), Ireland".
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday November 02 2015, @04:13PM
Even in places that are less complicated, you can still have roads with 2 or more names. And sometimes that becomes 3 names when you hit the city limits. It causes a lot of grief when Google will use the state designation even though the street itself doesn't have any markings to suggest the state designation.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @04:37PM
It causes a lot of grief when Google will use the state designation even though the street itself doesn't have any markings to suggest the state designation.
I've been surprised by that a couple times. Sounds like it would be trivial for the google camera van to OCR every sign it sees and only display turn by turn instructions using names actually visible on real world signs. Since it's blindingly obvious while they don't do that, I assume its some kind of patent insanity holding back progress.
Another blindingly obvious "why don't they OCR" / "must be patented" relates to landmarks. Instructions should have things like "Pass the prosperity gospel megachurch billboard on the left a half mile before your destination" or whatever to help you navigate.
My personal favorite came up just last weekend, you're cruising down a major arterial that is the border between two municipalities and there's an intersection turn left for county hwy WTF into the wilderness or right for Main street, and the locals only use the "cool" name so the verbal instructions are things like "turn left on to main" well there isn't a main street to the left because that's outside city limits! Am I lost or are they just really bad at giving directions, or possibly both?
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday November 02 2015, @09:11PM
It's a matter of point of view. Around here we have highway 99, which is also Aurora within the city limits. Inside the city it's Aurora and it's not unless you want to leave the city that calling it 99 makes any sense. Somebody who's coming to the street from the east or west would turn onto the same street. But, in one direction it's Aurora and the other it's 99. I doubt most locals think about it like that. I know I don't.
Landmarks are definitely doable, I suspect the problem there is deciding which ones to use. Without them personally driving the streets and making decisions about what would and wouldn't be used as a landmark for navigation, it would lead to the same problem I was talking about where the directions weren't particularly meaningful.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Monday November 02 2015, @02:17PM
I like to visit places in the countryside that have no generally recognised name.
So do I, in the UK, where serious walkers tend to use what is called the National Grid system which defines any spot to within 100 meters with two letters and six digits. !00 m is near enough to find eg "Go through in the gate on your left at SU 325798". No, you cannot remember it (so write it down or pre-mark it on your GPS device) but I would not remember a series of 3Word names either.
As for Third World nations not being able to define places, which I find very suprising, I suggest they get their acts together and start giving their places some names. The UK acquired most of its place names back in the Dark Ages, and streets are given names when they are built - mostly assigned by local people or the builders. It does not need planet-sized brains, vast amounts of money, computing power or First World aid to do it.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:08PM
Or, for identifying houses and other buildings (which is much more common as a target for navigation), we have a postcode, ranging in format from 'A9 9AA' to 'AA99 9AA'. This identifies no more than 100 properties; it can identify a single department or floor of a big business. They're very well-known and used everywhere in addresses — and they're already used almost universally in GPS, mapping, and navigation in the UK.
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