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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: 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.