If it's based on GPS, you could get a rough idea of where north was for the user, on average, while they were moving. It would be very static and wouldn't lend well to this sort of interface.
If all you have is WiFi- or cell-tower-based location, then you're not going to be able to get enough precision to make the value meaningful.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but don’t longitude and latitude already solve this problem? They are extremely accurate, and don’t require a specific app.
I think you'd have trouble getting accuracy <10 feet. GPS is usually about the same. Still, almost every device has WiFi so this is basically a free feature.
I don't know if it's possible anymore, but one way used to be that the app would send a list of every wifi network it could see. This can be used to calculate your position surprisingly accurately, in most places in the world.
I'm just spitballing here, but couldn't this be resolved by using coarse sampling and a moving average? As in infrequently sampling locations. I guess you could get fancier and adjust this with the speed at which the user is moving. I'd also imagine that just using low precision GPS would help add ambiguity so a person can't be exactly located. Of course, there's a relevant xkcd[0]. In the "neighborhood" seems like the most precision you'd want for something like this (of course you could expose this to the user), but I'm also not even interested in this feature so there's a bias.
No, because your solution will be off by that offset. eg. if the offset is 1KM to the north, and you tried the method mentioned in the blog post then your final solution will also be 1KM to the north. You can still use the information for limited stalking purposes (eg. has the person moved or not), but it's not nearly as useful as knowing their exact location.
On the contrary. Maybe if you're on a hardwired desktop, but for everything else it is incredibly accurate. You don't even need to have GPS in your device -- WiFi is plenty.
I could imagine a secure location service that allows your phone to compare its current expected position with other nearby phones' expectations of their positions. If it's over bluetooth or wifi, the positions should be within meters of each other. This could provide an input to a kalmann filter type position estimator to help reduce drift as you (for example) walk down the street.
I mean your cell phone's location from which you would otherwise tether the connection would be close enough. I guess no one has written an app to convey that information. The other use case of gps could be a good source of time if you have no network connectivity.
Sure let's speculate they have a function that returns a guessed gps coordinate at time t. Again there are dumb implementations for this. Can take a time decaying and time-of-day/day-of-week weighted mode of your recognized locations. I imagine it'd be fairly accurate.
If you don’t care about error rates and want an approximate location it could be done. If one finds satisfying a device which would tell you that you’re in such and such neighborhood but not give you the exact location sure.. We’re in 2020, that would be like travelling back in time
That other suggestion isn't good either. Let's say there is a train that leaves at a certain time. They will have to provide the exact GPS coordinates for someone to know when they need to be at the train station
How does one enter coordinates on that device? I'd guess that as an offset from your location ("200m north of my position") might be the easiest way. If that's the case, then starting with a zero offset would be the logical choice.
You'd hope they would add some sort of safety to prevent this sort of thing, though.
I smell an iPhone app. Uses GPS to determine what city you are in and then displays direction in local terms. I want one. This could even work in Boston where the North End is mostly east of City Hall and the South End is a couple of miles west of South Boston
If all you have is WiFi- or cell-tower-based location, then you're not going to be able to get enough precision to make the value meaningful.
reply