Get “My Location” sans GPS
Posted: December 1st, 2007 | 2 Comments »Wrt my research on location-awareness, My Location is an interesting new google beta application that find people’s location of people using its mobile mapping service (even if the phone isn’t equipped with a GPS receiver). A feature available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.
What is interesting is the display of uncertainty (as a light blue circle) if you don’t have a GPS-enabled phone around the blue dot (which corresponds to your GPS location). This uncertainty is claimed to be around one-quarter to three miles of a user’s location. But advantages for this ranges from getting a location without GPS, draining less power than GPS.
This “My location” feature map the coordinates of the cell tower the cell phone is registered with. This way, Google taps in the large number of its mobile maps users who have GPS phones (not locked by the carriers) and it’s a work-in progress process as described here:
“the database that identifies the location of a mobile phone is still under construction, so the service still sometimes draw a blank. The company expects to fill in the holes as more people use the service, Lee said. The tracking system’s database currently spans more than 20 countries, including United States, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Russian Federation and Taiwan. It doesn’t yet work in China or Japan.“
Also have a look at NYT blog where the Google PR explains this a bit better:
“The story also talks about where “you are”. We don’t actually know who the person is or reliably where the phone is. We know that specific queries where the map is centered have come from a unique id number. Sometimes that map will be centered because that is where you are (centered yourself or by use of My Location), or it is centered because that is where you are thinking of going, or it is centered because you are curious about a location but have no intention of actually going there. From our logs, we are not able to distinguish these three very common use cases. Also, users have the ability to re-set the unique client id number as often as they would like. Finally, we do not know who “you” are and don’t have any way of finding out. There is no name, phone number, address, email or account login associated with this information.“
It’s also relevant to browse some of the blogs and the comments / reactions
Why do I blog this? interesting stuff about my research interests. That approach (although not very new) is quite interesting and it’s intriguing to see how the interface reflects the different accuracy levels.
> This uncertainty is claimed to be around one-quarter to three
> miles of a user’s location.
Actually cellID can provides even higher accuracies in dense environments or much worse ones in desert ones. Here is an extract of the “cell of origin” article from Wikipedia which is coherent with what I learnt about cellID methods a few years ago :
“Crude COO positioning considers the location of the base station to be the location of the caller. This is not very accurate, as the majority of mobile network cells are projected from an antenna with a spread of 120o (i.e. three mounted on a mast to give complete coverage) giving a signal coverage area with the base station at one corner, rather than the centre. Omnidirectional cells may be used in rural locations (which typically have large ranges and hence uncertain locations for phones within them) and in cities (where they may have ranges of a few hundred metres). The underlying issue is that mobile phone networks are optimised for capacity and call handling rather than locating phones.
Most commercially implemented systems rely on ‘enhanced’ COO. In the GSM system this relies on the fact that the phones constantly measure the signal strength from the closest 6 base stations and lock on to the strongest signal (the reality is slightly more complex than this and includes parameters that each individual network can optimise, including signal quality and variabilty. Most networks endeavour to optimise for minimum power consumption, but the overall effect approximates to each phone locking onto the strongest signal).
All networks generate ‘splash maps’ predicting signal coverage when planning and managing their networks. These maps can be processed to analyse the area which will be dominated by each base station and to approximate each area by a circle (the actual area of coverage may not be exactly where predicted… and in any case will be an irregular shape, rather than a circle).”
Hi everyone.
A few days ago, I was surfing the web and I found out a project that works over most mobile phones which lets you know where your friends are in real time and update your status in twitter. It´s called Dimdix.
On their website they say you don´t need a GPS system to detect your location. Does anyone know how this works?
I´m using a Motorola L7 and amazingly it detected my location.
I cannot stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.
If anyone wants to take a look you can go here
Thanks,
Regards,
Juan