GPS for Rednecks, Courtesty of Nokia
For the directionally challenged, GPS Navigation Systems can be as coveted as cell phones. And with the proliferation of Mobile technology, where your cell phone is your GPS, there is rarely an excuse to ask, “Where the hell am I and how did I end up here?” Or is there… ?
Try out a little experiment. Get lost, purposefully, in the middle of some rural area. Ask for directions somewhere (anywhere) and you’ll likely get a response that sounds something like this:
“Alright yur gunna wunna go straight to the top of that there hill and turn right. Stay straight until you pass two red barns on the left and then yur gunna see Johnsonville pond right thur on yur right. Take a left right there and go straight until you see the biggest oak tree you ever did see and you’ll be about one acre away from the market.”
That’s right folks… it may sound strange but in some place, street signs and road names are not the currency of driving (or walking, or horseback) directions. Apparently, Nokia feels their pain. Dr. Kari Pulli of the Nokia Research Center explains:
“The instructions are based totally on real world pictures, not on synthetic maps,” he says. “We started developing the landmark mode when we realized that people read maps in different ways depending on things such as cultural background and gender.”
For the politically correct interpretation of this article, you can check Venture Beat, where we initially discovered Nokia’s new culture friendly mapping system.
With all due respect, the technology DOES have some great potential depending on how it is developed. In actuality, it sounds like a technology that would work incredibly well on the Android platform. The technology was originally suggested by a Nokia research group in India where landmark based directional advice is more commonly sought.
In any case, this is definitely something to watch as the technology has a lot more potential than providing dumbed down directions to country folks, as we initially suggest. Sorry… we couldn’t resist!