h a l f b a k e r yGo ahead. Stick a fork in it.
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I can't be the only one to have experienced this.
You're driving along an interstate highway
towards a destination, guided by a GPS app like
Google Maps, Waze, or TeleNav. You screw up
and take the wrong exit, say the one before the
correct exit, and wind up on a side road
paralleling the
highway.
You're so close to the
highway that the GPS doesn't realize you've left it
and therefore won't tell you how to get back on or
optimize directions to your original objective
from your new position.
So I'm imagining 2 ways for such an app to use
the smartphone to solve this problem. One would
be to use the camera, provided the phone is in a
dash mount, to 'see' what you're doing on the
road and direct you accordingly. The other uses a
feature already common to GPS apps (though
noticeably lacking in Google Maps... grrr...) which
is speedometer displayed on the screen of your
smartphone. If you suddenly decelerate near an
exit, it pops up a window asking if you just exited
the highway. A simple two button popup for Yes
or No would suffice.
That is all.
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Annotation:
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Option 3: since you got off just 1 exit before you
intended, and are now on a straight road paralleling
the highway, you could continue straight forwards
and look with your eyeballs until you see the road
you're looking for. |
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Right, but sometimes the next onramp isn't easily accessible from the sideroad, or there's a faster way to get to your destination than taking the suggested exit and a quick reroute would get you there faster than hunting down the originally suggested path. Other times, I've taken the correct exit and because it was onto a parallel road it thought I'd missed the exit and kept trying to reroute me to the next exit to turn around. |
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proper, dedicated GPS units like the one I rented last
week seem to have got this right, I wandered onto
numerous incorrect parallel roads while trying to
avoid the I95 toll 'round NYC the other week and it
caught all of them as far as I could tell. |
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There's already an app (I can't recall the name of it at the moment) which uses your smartphone's camera to monitor the road ahead and alert drowsy drivers if they start to drift into another lane or if their speed changes by more than a few mph. I think it's called iOnRoad or something like that. Integrating it with a navigation app just makes sense in my estimation. |
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you could put QR codes or some other form of
machine-readable data onto signs (possibly active
IR?). Would be particularly useful for alerting
navigation software about diversions etc. |
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