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Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

When you give developers more tools, they surprise you with what they come up with. Consumers didn't say they wanted accelerometers, but once developers got ahold of them, they proved massively useful.

If you give me a new sensor, I might not have any ideas on how to make it useful, but if one developer has one good idea, that benefits me.

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Exactly correct! Google and Motorola put a barometer into the Xoom to test GPS altitude improvements, and it turned out that some developers (like me, and like the opensignal team) discovered that the sensor actually has world-changing potential in atmosphere modelling. Huge benefit from a simple sensor addition that didn't even really have a clear purpose at launch.

But then that goes back to funkyy's point: there may be lots of unexpected things developers can do with it, but none of them so far are things customers care about. Atmospheric modeling? Really cool! Do customers care? Heck no.

They'll care when they get very high accuracy weather forecasts! New models will result in more accurate, more personalized and relevant forecasts that I think customers will love. This is a very tough problem that nobody has cracked yet, but it looks promising in the near future. We'll see.

But there is still the question of value proposition to the consumer.

Is the incrimental marginal cost of including the sensor low enough that the improvements in weather forcasting will be demananded by consumers?

I dont believe the target demographic of samsung is swayed towards their products by an additional 5 even 10 degrees of weather accuracy. But i have no data to back this up.

Are there any papers on the topic of including this new data written by actual meteorologists?

Yes, there are quite a few relevant papers. Here's a preliminary study from 2006 regarding weather forecasting using surface pressure measurements on the synoptic scale: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175

A number of papers have been published since as that work has continued. So we know that surface pressure data is useful on a large scale; is it useful on a micro- or mesoscale? A few researchers are actively writing and publishing papers on this topic. Cliff Mass at the University of Washington, along with his colleagues and students, are leading the charge.

https://ams.confex.com/ams/94Annual/webprogram/Paper236282.h...

Customers are idiots. To wit:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford

Customers aren't always idiots. However, there's a special kind of engineering idiocy that thinks that having a humidity sensor in a phone is a great idea.

Even with a large sample, temperature and humidity data is useless unless it is ensured to be properly measured (ie outdoors, away from the person, etc). Pressure data is another story, and although it is still low quality it can be smoothed.

That's why I prefer pressureNET to opensignal. Also pressureNET is actually open source, unlike opensignal which sells all your smartphone/personal data to anyone who wants it.

WeatherSignal is a slightly different project to OpenSignal (but it's by the same people) - we're sharing data with several academic institutions and independent researchers, and will make the feed fully open. Also NB, PressureNet is a great project, WeatherSignal also collects pressure data but I think other sensors are relevant.

We have an algorithm in WeatherSignal that tries to determine whether users are indoors or outdoors - there's a roof icon that appears or disappears, try it, it's pretty accurate during the day time.

WeatherSignal project is basically funded by OpenSignal sales, we sell to carriers and regulators -- who can act on the data to improve service.

(I'm James Robinson, a co-founder of OpenSignal/WeatherSignal)

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