Driving with a Global Positioning System -Gabrielle the GPS
Published on 27 Aug 2007 at 8:53 pm.
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In the background you’ll hear rain, that’s rain in Baguio care of typhoon “Egay”.
In this podcast I’ll talk about Gabrielle the GPS, Gabrielle the Global Positioning System. Back in April, me and my teammate Tina went to the US-in San Francisco. And while we were there we rented a car, it was a Ford SUV [I think it was an Escape]. And then in the SUV there was a built-in gadget which they called I think it’s branded something like “Never Lost”.
“Never Lost” is a service by the car-rental Hertz. It’s a global positioning system to help motorist navigate through the streets of the US. So the global positioning system, the GPS had an LCD display it was a colored display that shows us distance, time, direction, street names, map in different views, etc. It had a keypad, it was a numerical keypad but you can enter letters and then it had arrows for navigation [up down left right etc.] to navigate the menu.
And then to start off you’d enter the GPS and then you would give the destination. For example you can give destination in terms of the exact address or you could name some street corner, you could also search for establishments such as convenient stores, gas stations, restaurants, and hotels. You could also search through the previous destinations that were entered in your GPS before you used it.
And then once you’ve chosen the destination, you are asked to choose the type of route you want. The type of route can be determined by the shortest distance, most use of freeway, least use of freeway. That means you have you have a choice between driving through the highway or driving through the side street. So that depends on the driver what her/his preference is.
After defining the route, the GPS will give you the estimated distance and travel time. But of course the travel time doesn’t have factored in the traffic conditions of the street. So travel time on rush hour would still be the same as the travel time at midnight because the GPS does not have the traffic situation information built-in [not yet at least] or the one we use doesn’t have that. I think that’s going to be a future upgrade later on.
The GPS has some audio to guide the driver so that he does not need to look at the GPS every so often right? So there are audio prompts while the driver drives to guide the driver which lane to choose, where to turn, how far to the next turn, etc. So a sample:
So the GPS will say something like:
Keep to your left.
Turn left in .5 miles
Next left.
After your next left keep right
And then when the driver reaches the destination the GPS would say:
You have arrived. (Something like that)
So that’s a sample.
There are a variety of GPS available commercial in the US. The one we used is like an additional appliance installed in the car. It was installed on a flexible arm [what do we call it something like a “goose neck” similar to what they use to hold a cd player-mobile cd player].
There are also GPS that are in-dash, installed in the car on the dash board underneath the stereo or something like that.
But one of my cousins had a GPS which was purchase of the rack-its mobile; it can be detached from the dash boar and it can be taken with you. It’s as big as a mp4 player or as big as a cellphone and then it’s powered by the car’s lighter outlet. And then he’s able to download information from the internet and install it in his GPS. Information like road update, news [I don’t know].
But the interesting thing is he is able to download voices. So the voice that we had on the rented car was a female voice. It was an American female voice so we [my teammate and I] called our GPS Gabrielle-a female Gabrielle. We called it that because she was doing to be our GPS angel guiding us through the streets of San Francisco.
My cousin on the other hand had different voices on his GPS- there was a British voice, a male voice, a female voice, they had different names for them-Macy and all these voice. But the interesting voice was a “Mike Myers’ voice. It was an Austin power voice. In contrast to the other voices who would say upon reaching the destination they would say “You have arrived”. In the Austin power voice, the Austin power voice upon reaching the destination he would say: “Yeah babe Yeah!”
Wasn’t that funny huh?
So there that’s my story about Global Positioning System in the US and Gabrielle the GPS.
Pahabol.
Why hasn’t GPS been used in the Philippines?
GPS in the Philippines will take a few more years to come. We do not have a good documentation of streets in the Philippines. They’re not yet on digital format so unlike the US and Canada their streets are well documented and digital format. We don’t have that yet on the Philippines. Once we have that then it could be an easier leap.
There is a GPS service by Nokia-the cellphone, the latest cellphone I don’t know what it is. But I haven’t seen it work and I don’t think it’s as extensive as the GPS service that they have in the vehicles in the US. So let’s see maybe it could work after development projects by some of the commercial ventures in the Philippines. But that’s yet to be seen.
Let’s see how it goes.
Update: There are companies, after all, who are creating digital maps for the Philippines. The maps on the Nokia commercials — those are digitized image maps — like photos of a paper map. There are companies (like the group behind ANTS and another group called Philippine Navigation and Tracking Solution) that are creating digital maps. I wonder when they can overlay that on Google maps …
Podcast permalink: My GPS Story
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25 August 2007
Technobiography
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