Monthly Archives: August 2011

While dead reckoning solutions have been deployed for many first responder applications, allowing pedestrians to find their location indoors remains the elusive Holy Grail for location based mobile services. However, progress along many fronts suggests that a solution may be at hand in the near future. Pedestrian maps are becoming more useful. Not long ago, mobile mapping applications like Google Maps in pedestrian mode often gives the same directions as in vehicle mode except it would ignore one-way traffic restrictions. Now, pedestrian mode direction will take the user to overpasses and underpasses to cross a street. Of course, indoor maps are still emerging and a standard way to handle maps for multi-storied buildings remains lacking. However, proprietary and open source … Continue reading →

Market analysts now project that five billion MEMS sensors will be shipped in 2016 to support applications like navigation, dead reckoning, image stabilization, and augmented reality in smart phones, e-readers, tablets and gaming platforms. Although these applications are all extremely useful, we think they represent only a fraction of the functions sensors will perform. After all, most consumers don’t need directions, take pictures, or play games more than a few hours a day. But sensors, and intelligent algorithms, will be working all the time to help applications understand user contexts. Today, smart phones and tablets use sensors to understand user context in a few primitive ways. Turn the tablet from portrait to landscape orientation and the content of the display … Continue reading →