Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone got proof that this is technically possible at a hardware level on a phone?

I'd expect one good implementation as proof, not hand waving it should work.

I can think of one place it would be useful - museums/indoors at large monuments and people would pay extra money to use the device so it would be funded. But I've yet to see it.

View on HN

I used it as a proof of concept to test the service. Mapped an office space in QGIS. The IMDF format is actually quite nice and portable. It’s really just GEOJSON with some extra properties and can be migrated to any map/service that uses the format.

The actual blue dot generated after mapping is pretty spot on. A slight delay while it catches up to you when walking but honestly some of the best in class when it comes to performance.

Catch is, would it still work next week. Humidity changes, or the wireless situation changes, like someone turns their hotspot on. More people walking around. The carpet is vacuumed.

I can't find anyone using it IRL. I don't think the hardware supports it in an usable fashion.

The one reason you might look at all this now is for Covid-19 they have turned on some Bluetooth features, but I think they are still not available for non Covid-19 apps anyway.

Great question. If I ever go back into the office it would be interesting to retest again.

The mapping is fairly straightforward and many of these technologies require periodic remapping. We’ve yet to test (or find) any tech that does a self healing as things change.

So, if one person activates the hotspot feature on their phone, does it render this inoperable?

Definitely no.

The indoor maps feature was released a year ago, and is by now in active use at many transit stations (like New York metro, London Underground), airports (like LAX), shopping malls (like Westfield in San Francisco)... you can see a list of dozens of airports already mapped here, actually: https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#maps-indoor-...

I don’t think any of the indoor mapping relies on Bluetooth, why do you think that?

Depends by what you mean.

is it possible to map a room in real time just using cameras? yes. There are loads of SLAM and other reconstruction systems out there.

Is it possible to do all that an link it accurately to a position on a "world" map? not yet (not without the use of the cloud.)

Is it possible to share a map built on a phone so two phones have the same frame of reference? kinda, but its not practical using just phone hardware

(Using a visual positioning service its possible to get an accurate starting position and let the onboard SLAM figure out the rest. That way you can have each phone tracking the key points it sees and when a VPS update comes in, adjusting the local SLAM map to match.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com