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Forget GPS, Hello WPS
No France writes "A company known as skyhook wireless has announced the commercial availability of its Wi-Fi Positioning System, or WPS. The company has compiled a database of every wireless access point it can find in a given city. When a mobile user running th Skyhook client is in a recorded area, their position is calculated by selecting the surrounding signals and comparing them to the reference database. Currently there are 25 US cities mapped, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Apparently this device is accurate to within 20-40 meters, though one has to wonder how well it deals with people moving their wireless access points."
Cities are the one place a positioning system is useless, so why develop it there?
You haven't tried to find a specific place in Tokyo or Osaka, have you?
Having a Gps is a life saver. You look up the place you want to go to on an online map, get the coordinates, and you're set. Without it, it's just too easy to miss the right building, mistake streets for each other or get lost in many other creative ways.
You could argue the other way round (and just as stupidly) - since there's one single highway or road in the entire area, why would you need a Gps to know which one you're on?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Don't these people realize how accurate GPS positioning has become?
MGIS-grade equipment can now give positions with sub-foot ( 30cm) postprocessed accuracy. Survey-grade equipment can get within 5-10 cm.
As neat as WPS sounds, I don't think that anyone will be giving up GPS soon if WPS can't get any more accurate than 20-40 meters.
"Equal bytes for women!"
Strange how the world turns, I just mentioned PlaceLab to a friend before loading Slashdot. Spooky!
PlaceLab's big advantage is the ability to use multiple sources. Wardriving data is just one potential input. If you have a GPS receiver and a wi-fi card and a CDMA phone all connected, it'll use whichever is giving the most trustworthy results. So you can move smoothly between urban, rural, and indoor environments.
What absolutely makes me giggle is this: "Morgan adds that GPS typically only locates things within a few hundred meters, whereas the Wi-Fi location system can get within 20 to 40 meters of an object."