Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

In most mobile applications, GPS phones are typically used to track the physical location of their users. iPointer is an interesting location-based service that uses GPS phones as “pointers” for identifying physical things that surround their users — e.g., landmarks, buildings, and point of interests.

This is how I think it works.

When a user points the device at a nearby landmark, the iPointer device records location and orientation of the user. The device uses an embedded GPS receiver to record user location and a digital magnetic compass to record user orientation. In order to determine the physical thing that the user is currently pointing at, this location and orientation information is sent to a remote server for further processing.

Once the user information is arrived at the remote server, the server uses various algorithms to approximate the exact physical thing that the user is interested. There is a predefined database of physical things that the server has knowledge about. In other words, unless the server knows what I own in life, if I point the device at my car or pets, the iPointer server probably won’t reply with any useful answers.

I think iPointer will only work well in an outdoor environment and in which the subject of interest has relatively large physical presence (e.g., a building). Due to the technology limitation of GPS for indoor usage, for example, should a user want to identify paintings in an art museum, iPointer probably won’t be able to distinguish paintings that are hung nearby of each other.

Thinking about indoor location-based applications remained me of the CoolTown project that I had worked while interning at the HP Labs. It seems that the project is R.I.P.

The story was spotted on esato.com