Garmin is at everyone’s sight right now. This article at CNNMoney opens up interesting new developments.
Also, research (made possible by OTX and eCrush which shows the kind of tool kids have at their disposal nowadays) announces that kids don’t care for GPS. [Via GPSWorld]
Not the technology, but the use you can make out off it I would add.
They digg geocahing.
Couple of days ago I made a presentation at a school in the Santa Cruz area. After the lecture groups went after caches hidden in the campus.They had an idea about where North was, latitude/longitude, and that some satellites were broadcasting time above their heads.
They looked curiously at the GPS receivers trying to understand what to do to get their treasure hunt prizes.
Back to the class they went out again to obtain the coordinates of specific location in the campus, out and indoors (teacher’s door handle for example). And back again to compare their findings.
Hardware Facts
PDA’s suck, mind the language, power and patience. Their compass runs too erratically and the 3D GPS signal is harder to stay fixed.
Had also a chance to try the Garmin 60CS and I liked it a lot. My geocaching friend thought that the antenna was slower than our Magellan’s, but I have a cheaper model than his so it didn’t quite showed that way to me.
And the firmware on the Magellan’s does need improvement to add all the features you can find on the Garmin’s.
Kids digg it
It was a great experience to hide caches and worry about weather, scope good sites and see their curious faces.
Curious about what kind of future the technology that is mirroring their lifestyles will be.
But technology will only do its part, they still learn how to read their own compasses.
Lots going on but for now just a note on a British first: bet on Derek’s location, GPS-based.
If around Glastonbury, check their upcoming Summer of Love 2007.
If you got one around plus the GPS receiver from Play-Asia, go try it out.
First at PSPFanBoy via Engadget.
BusinessWeek and GigaOm bring up the fact that using phones for navigation instead of dedicated PND’s (Personal Navigation Devices) might get bigger than originally thought. You don’t need map updates for one and it is easier to obtain traffic information for another.
And if you consider that you might pay about 10$ a month it is still cheaper than a dedicated device.
Electronic Engineering Times published a colletions of “teardown’s” in Under The Hood including one of the defunct Gizmondo using “two-chip set from SiRF (#STGRF2i/LP and #GSP2e/LP)”.
The same EETimes points out that Galileo is late.
. A working prototype for
“a game […] that enables kids/big kids travelling in the back seat of cars to enjoy a rich gaming experience where narrative episodes and embedded gameplay combine[d] with the experience of traveling through the road network”
has been completed successfully according to the research website. GeoBloggers went through the work of putting it all together here.
. The 15-sec delay of the British Train door opening at Victoria Station.
. BusinessWeek and CNet lists the GPS Gadgets for the Season,
. Some thoughts on Surveillance, Privacy, Tracking by the NewStandardNews,
. Technology Review talks about technology developed by Sarnoff that combines computer vision with missing GPS data in urban canyon and field for militar and civil use.
. Epson offering new A-GPS chipset for W-CDMA2 phones according to Irish Dev.
The new line of Mindstorms, the NXT generation from Lego sunsets their interest with the previous product line but opens up possibilities like a GPS enabled Lego Jeep.
According to the project page, the NXT supports Bluetooth so it is possible to add GPS navigation to the project, plus a Compass Sensor can be used. But from the comments sounds like this project depends on a language capable of handling ASCII strings from an actual receiver.
Brian Davis in one of the comments mentions RobotC. Still, doable.
NXT uses LabView from National Instruments as its programming platform. A product that by itself might be worth the $250 price tag.
And at this time of the year, it might get hard to control the impulse buy from grown-up kids.
October issue of Wired goes graphic novel on Gizmondo’s meltdown. More later. It also includes a two-page article on the growing dominance of TeleAtlas against the giant NavTeq.
It details the sale of GDT and how the group helped move the company forward.
[Articles go online in a month or so or put 10$ a year (US) for these enjoyable suprises.]
California passing legislation on GPS tracking: “SB 1178, sponsored by Sen. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, […] makes permanent a pilot sex-offender GPS program.”
Second from the new-generation of GPS satellites from Lockhead Martin to be launched Monday.
Tools
Nokia announced the release of Carbide c++ based on Eclipse. “Developed in cooperation with Symbian”. Care was taken to provide a migration path to users of the previous toolkit provided by CodeWarrior.
As in their toolkit, Carbide offers three product levels: Professional, Developer and the free Express. Previous users can upgrade from CodeWarrior 3.1 offers to the corresponding ones in the Carbide toolset.
Carbide c++ 1.1 Professional and Developer are now available in the same download, requires registration for product key generation.
RAD
Carbide c++ Professional includes an User inteface designer for the SWT based graphical library.
RAD Tools were introduced by Borland with products like JBuilder with RAD standing for Rapid Application Development.
The free version, Carbide 1.0 Express wasn’t updated since touched last at Feb 21, 06.
For Java development also based in Eclipse there is Carbide.j 1.5, available for free.
Installed base
Just notice that we are talking here in 39 million devices running Symbian OS and still according to the PR, “during the first half of 2005, more than 14.5 million devices were sold to more than 200 network operators worldwide.”
I read this and thought it had something to do PhoneTag, the GPS-based game that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s company, LivePlanet are developing for Amp’d Mobile. The exclusive WSJ published a whole article about GPS games on mobile phones saying that PhoneTag should be available in July. [Full article was available here.]
“Amp’d Mobile users will be able to invite a circle of friends to join in a game of PhoneTag by sending text invitations to their cellphones, or to participate in a game with strangers. When a game starts, players will be given a target - another player - that appears on their cellphone screens as a dot on a virtual map. The game can be played on almost any territory, whether a college campus or a city.”
But no. It was talking about the real GPS game. Find the GeoCache.
While trying to imply what the concept of a wearable GPS could result into, a young fella close by mentioned: “they already did it”. I was saying something like: “the idea is to match your virtual location with a real one”.
You wearing a GPS-enabled jacket and goggles with some sort of display formed in such a way that you could read and see images. How do you control your movement? GPS does. You and the other players run the labirint and you follow it.
Maybe not exactly as described above but see yourself as PacMan, after something, away from others. Pick your place in the screen showing up in your goggles (no, not the other one), move around this gameboard, define a strategy, watch the game, of loss, and gain. Kinda sounds like Real life.