what3words - Interesting location idea

[FlyingMonkey]

This is simple and elegant...any location on Earth can be located within three meters, by referencing three English words.  Seems a much easier way to remember locations and relay them accurately, since humans don't remember long lat/long strings easily and they are easily relayed with errors.

 

https://www.bydanjohnson.com/something-completey-different-perhaps-super-helpful-to-pilots-just-3-words/

[Warmi]

Interesting but it will only make sense if they can license the spatial database they are using so folks can download it to their local devices ( you can't reasonably expect your potential crash location have access to some kind of data service so , for pilots,  online APIs are out... )

Since their resolution is much higher than a typical synthetic vision implementation ( which is usually 100x100 or 20x20 meters) it will require quite a bit of local storage since it is not enough to just store sampled 16 or 12 bit height value  - now you have to store some kind of index that can be decomposed into pointers to each word and then you have to store the word database itself ( which can be compressed though )

But since you don't need to grab the whole world, it could be possible to just download say North America or some other bounded location which would make storage requirements reasonable ..

Anyway, if they are unwilling to license their database, then the whole point is moot to begin with ..

 

[FlyingMonkey]

15 minutes ago, Warmi said:

Interesting but it will only make sense if they can license the spatial database they are using so folks can download it to their local devices ( you can't reasonably expect your potential crash location have access to some kind of data service so , for pilots,  online APIs are out... )

Since their resolution is much higher than a typical synthetic vision implementation ( which is usually 100x100 or 20x20 meters) it will require quite a bit of local storage since it is not enough to just store sampled 16 or 12 bit height value  - now you have to store some kind of index that can be decomposed into pointers to each word and then you have to store the word database itself ( which can be compressed though )

But since you don't need to grab the whole world, it could be possible to just download say North America or some other bounded location which would make storage requirements reasonable ..

Anyway, if they are unwilling to license their database, then the whole point is moot to begin with ..

 

Yeah, I think the idea is to let apps and such license access to the database to do their lookups.  I'm sure the database is quite large and generally will not be practical for local storage, but I'm not sure since data compression could reduce the space quite a bit.

Part of the genius here is that the database will be static, since the size of the Earth and number of locations on it are fixed -- Once you know the three words for a specific location, they will never change.  If somebody asks for your house location, you don't even have to give a potentially difficult to remember address like "2536 Bronsonman Lane, Southeast", you can just say "pixie. table. square" which is much easier to remember, and then the app can translate it to a GPS location and do the route calculation.

For aviation, the example in the article is you have an off-airport landing in an unfamiliar area, and you need to let somebody know where you are.  It seems easier to say "I'm at 'mantis.rockslide.feather'" than giving out a lot of lat/long numbers that throw things way off if you get just one digit wrong.  

[Warmi]

Definitely easier and a great idea ... just not practical for pilots unless they can lookup their current location offline - or , alternatively , if satellites start transmitting this data as additional metadata to go with coordinates hehe