A NEW ORIENTATION FOR GPS November 15, 2005 By Rafe Needleman Since I started writing about technology (which, if you count my early stabs at science fiction as a child, would be about 1972), I've been waiting for one particular product to come out: The handheld gizmo that I can use while walking around to direct me to where I want to go: the closest bus station, the nearest good Chinese restaurant. The development of the PDA, plus the cell phone, the global positioning system (GPS), and content services such as Vindigo, have all helped to get us much closer to this ideal than I ever thought we would be in my lifetime, but we're still not quite there. The reason: Even a good GPS-equipped handheld device that knows where it is can't tell you in which direction it's pointing. It sounds like a minor issue, but it's not. Directions to "walk this way," are a lot harder to follow when you first have to figure which way "this" is. You'd think this would be an easy problem to solve: Just put a compass in your device and use it to orient the screen's display appropriately. Why didn't anybody think of this before? Why don't current handheld urban GPS gizmos like the brand-new Garmin iQueM5 have compass sensors in them? Somebody did think of this before, though: GeoVector, founded in 1993 by John Ellenby (founder of GRiD Systems) and his sons Thomas and Peter, is built around this simple concept. I talked to Peter, officially GeoVector's New Media Director, about his long-running startup while looking over a prototype GeoVector device, made in 1998 and about the size and heft of an old Apple Newton. The company developed the prototype device only as a proof of concept; the goal for GeoVector is to develop the technology - which takes location plus direction information as input and returns useful data as output - and license it to device companies. Technologically, I think GeoVector's addition to geolocation technology seems like a pretty simple algorithmic problem, and after talking to Peter I am still not completely convinced it isn't. I am not a programmer, though, and Peter assures me that there is some magic involved that is protected by a patent. The company licenses the patent together with its software. In any event, the strategy appears to be taking hold. Asian wireless phones companies are now shipping devices with both geolocation (GPS) and orientation (compass) sensors in them; all they need is software and an online service to enable them to display geo-targeted information that is completely unambiguous. GeoVector has contracts to supply the software and IP to the carriers to make this possible. The obvious first GeoVector application is mapping and directions, but there are many more possible applications, including social networking (a cellular version of Plazes, perhaps), dating ("you are now pointing at a potential mate"), location-based commerce (point at a billboard and get a coupon), or even an annotated, geolocated wiki (see Socialight for a taste of the concept). Will we see GeoVector products in the United States? Peter believes we will, but not soon. In this country, he feels he's inventing a market, and doing that via our cellular carriers is painfully slow. Asian carriers are simply more innovative and flexible. They also share more of the revenue third-party applications generate, encouraging innovation. GeoVector is not the whole story when it comes to providing highly targeted data to handheld users. Since it's based on GPS, it won't work indoors, nor can it read its surroundings in any way other than discerning location and direction. In other words, GeoVector can't tell what your cell phone is pointing at if the object is not on a map (for example, an item on a store shelf or a moving vehicle). For that you need something like ScanBuy, which enables cell-phone cameras to read product barcodes. Or, for a device that knows not just how to get from one place to another but which routes are the least congested, you want a navigation service like Inrix or Circumnav. Ultimately, location-aware devices will get orientation awareness. And camera sensors. And feeds on local conditions from the Internet. Positioning from the GPS system is just one part of geolocation, and as more companies surface that add additional location-specific information to mobile devices, they will encourage the development of new apps and services that make our existing mapping and route-finding devices look utterly prehistoric. Please read the Terms & Conditions for Use. These include guidelines governing appropriate use, and viewing or download of material in this section is considered acceptance of those Terms & Conditions.