Real Life Bookmark
posted by Tiangao on 30 August 2007 19:09 Go to the market place Go to forum
Problem context :
I am lost again. I am sure my home is somewhere very close. Mom will be angry again.
This city is amazing. I've been walking for 2 hours at least. How far am I from the hotel? Should I grab a cab or will I have the time to walk back before diner? Which direction should I walk to anyway?
Wouldn't that be a great idea to map all the shop of brand X on Google Maps and Yahoo Maps? They have at least 10 shops in the 30 key cities we are targeting. We don't have the budget to buy 30 GPS receivers to finish this on time.
My office is 35km away from my home. Kewl! And now I can map my home directly without wasting time looking through the maps.
S**t, can't remember the name of my hotel! Really no clue how far it is and what direction to go!
Wow this landscape is wonderful, if I new the exact latitude and longitude I could find it on Google Maps later ...
If only I could note down the coordinates of all the places I am shooting ...
Image if we could find a way to let our loyal customers know where is the closest Startbucks when they are walking in the street ...
Adele, try to remember where we are. I want to come back later to buy this shirt for my grandson.
- they don't have the budget to buy a GPS receiver
- a GPS receiver is too complex to use for them
Proposed Solution :
- it goes off after 30 seconds inactivity the time, thus saving the energy of the lithium battery.
- one push of the button and it will switch on and display the information of your bookmarked point
- the following information are scrolling in a loop on the LED screen: distance to the point, an arrow pointing direction to the point, the longitude and the latitude
- after 30 seconds the device switches off
- one long push of the button and the device stores your current location
- point number from 1 to 20 is displayed first in the information list
- short pushes of the button cycles trough the list of 20 points
Submissions (5)
Basic version = Wayfinder (a la Quarentine)
answered by decker04 on 31 August 2007 23:10
The basic version of this sounds like a directional element in the video game Quarentine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_%28computer_game%29) which acted as a compass/distance display for finding your next waypoint for missions or destinations. I love the idea of something that I could carry with me like a compass that shows my destination. Either push a button to "set" the point you want to find your way *back* to (super useful for travelling, especially if you're an off-the-map guy with bad memory, like me) or plug it in to the USB slot on your laptop and mark a destination for it to indicate.
Power? GPS in mobile phones?
answered by Stasiu on 5 September 2007 16:25
How would you like to power it? It'd need charging sessions. I'm not sure how significant is GPS chip power consumption... But yet another gizmo to remember to charge doesn't sound attractive I reckon. But you've got a point. If someone can't aford a GPS enabled mobile they won't have any other gizmos either. One thing though... with all these smartphones given away by mobile companies how many people won't have a GPS functionality in their phones 2 years from now... 'Life Bookmark' phone application would be interesting instead.
GPS needs to advance a bit first
answered by tagline on 11 September 2007 7:09
At the moment GPS uses quite a bit of power. The latest phone versions with GPS barely last the day without a charge if you are using GPS functions. Most GPS units take a minute or two to "Find" a signal when they are first turned on. This kills some of the convinience. Still, the devices are getting smaller. What I would like is a cheap GPS that I could just chuck in my pocket / backpack that would track the course that I had run / cycled so that I could down load it all into a PC at home. Link it into Google Earth perhaps?
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Full version is questionable
answered by ivanii on 9 September 2007 22:43
If there is no keyboard, how one can know difference between 20 places?