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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: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:49AM
Both sets of coordinates miss the house and the barn.
I don't know what this means??
If you are aiming for a mobile target that is in that field, you will likely need real-time decision making capability, rather than bomb-on-coordinate targeting.
Sure. In a new scenario that you presented yourself you'll need real time targeting. What does that have to do with the suitability of competing coordinate systems for specifying fixed points? And even in your scenario the bomb-delivery-system still needs to navigate to the field.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:12PM
I was just commenting on your coordinates. There's no clear target in the Wisconsin field containing the lat/long you listed. The real-time targeting scenario was a supposition that you had other imagery besides what Google and Bing offer that might show a target for the drone. http://binged.it/1Hpq4rI [binged.it]
Based on your feedback, though, I suspect those given coordinates were arbitrary...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:12PM
Based on your feedback, though, I suspect those given coordinates were arbitrary...
Completely arbitrary. I'm thoroughly amused that it was somewhere almost interesting enough to have seemed relevant. I can just imagine with just a little more luck on my side there might be some poor farmer in Wisconsin wondering what I have against him and his barn; that it was targeted so precisely... :)