Navigation and GPS
This week, we had a slightly different class from data lab in the Tisch Library.
We literally held GPS walking around campus to add points to our own database. We imported data to the google earth and learned how to analyze and use ArcGIS Online system, which is awesome to see your own data collection in the map.
Great Resource: Tisch Data Lab
Here are some class notes I found interesting:
Need four satellites to locate, three satellites to cover globally
I was a little bit surprised when I heard we need four satellites, not 3 to locate a person. (I just remember three satellites somehow) It turns out that in geostationary orbit, three satellites would cover the whole Earth, but to have a precise location of a person, we need 4.
The first satellite locates you somewhere on a sphere. The second satellite narrows your location to a circle created by the intersection of the two satellite spheres. The third satellite reduces the choice to two possible points. Finally, the fourth satellite helps calculate a timing and location correction and selects one of the remaining two points as your position.
GPS is not a name for the general technology. It's the name of US Navigation system.
The Global Positioning System, originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radio navigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Air Force. Europe, Russia, and China all have their own system, which is not named GPS.
Add different layers, have your own web app for your map
ArcGIS Online is a great resource! You could import different maps that were created and shared by other to your design. You could also customize the setting, export the map to a web framework, share your work with the world. So many cool things you could do with ArcGIS.
Not all of the data was collected by professional, and you could help too
Not like we I thought, some data was collected by different people. Everyone could be part of the system to add data. It means you could have your own data set even if you are recording the trash bins location or stop sign placing. This gives us more opportunity to use the system.
Map and Human Factors
I found this article Prototyping a Smoother Map about map design and interaction design. It was written by UX designer in google maps. Worth reading it.
One example of his designs is the zooming function.
"Zooming was originally very simple, it just replaced the map with the next set of tiles, but that was a little bit jarring because it would suddenly “snap” between levels."
"A more recent adaptation made it feel more responsive. When zooming, it temporarily keeps both zoom levels worth of tiles (the old and the new) and does a very quick scale animation between them—the new tiles start scaled down by half, and the old tiles are animated up to double size."
Those amazing insights bring a smooth experience of Google Maps to everyone. Is that enough? Could we do better? As a human factors engineer, that's our job to make it happen and do it better.
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