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what3words Navigation Integration

PENFOLD

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Ford is a backer of this technology/service
Will Rivian adopt this into the navigation screen(s)?

What is what3words?

Imagine trying to navigate to an off-road area *without* needing to remember clunky GPS coordinate numbers?
This is possible with what3words ( https://what3words.com ) which assigns three words to every 3 square meter on earth
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aAlpine

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WOAH. What a great idea! 3m accuracy is plenty for really any typical day-to-day application and makes it much harder to make typos and can be picked up by voice recognition systems trivially nowadays.
 
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Here’s a real-world scenario.
Would you rather use GPS latitude/longitude or what3words to direct yourself or a friend to this outhouse at El Mirage Dry Lake?

https://w3w.co/ocean.spear.brightness
 

skyote

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I get it, and interesting for sure. Much easier to remember & enter than GPS coords, but effectively the same.
 

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Here’s a real-world scenario.
Would you rather use GPS latitude/longitude or what3words to direct yourself or a friend to this outhouse at El Mirage Dry Lake?

https://w3w.co/ocean.spear.brightness
I get it, and interesting for sure. Much easier to remember & enter than GPS coords, but effectively the same.
The thing is that the days when we punched latitude and longitude into a keyboard or entered them by dials are long gone. We now tell the system where we want to go on a map and the navigation system translates the map coordinates to whatever coordinates it works with. I don't know how closely Rivian will mimic Tesla WRT to its navigation system but I will be most surprised if it is not at least equally capable. At any rate, what you do with the Teslas is go to a mapping application and put your finger on the location of the outhouse on its map. It designates that as a waypoint which you then "share" with the car. When you get to the car the location is in its navigation system and a route has been laid out to that waypoint (or actually to the point on a navigable road that the car knows about that is closest to the waypoint). You can also do this on the nav map in the car. I really don't see any need for what3words in this scenario. You have to know where you are trying to go in order to get there and that requires that you consult a map and once you have found it on the map you don't need to know its WGS x,y,z, its latitude and longitude on any reference spheroid, its Maidenhead coordinates, its UTM's or its 3 words. Once you have been to the place its location is in your system in whatever coordinates it stores them.

The story is a little different if you have never been there before or are directing someone else who has never been there before. In this case you must be told where it is, or must tell your friend where it is, in enough detail that he can find it on Google (or Apple) maps (keep going south past where Blanco Road tees at Hess Ranch road for about 1/4 mi. It's on the left...). From this one can easily locate the actual dunny on the satellite pitcture, designate it as a waypoint and share it with the vehicle.

Still not much of a problem but if your friend has the what3words app installed and if you have told him the goal is "ocean.spear.brightness" he can say those three words into his phone and it will light up the waypoint on its map. There is a button which allows this to be shared with a Tesla but it doesn't currently work. What he can still do is share it with a Nav app (Google Maps or Apple Maps). The way point then appears in that app and can be successfully shared with the Tesla from there. Voila! A route has been laid in when you go to the car.

So I don't really see much use for it but it would be nice if Rivian (and Tesla) would let you say "Navigate to ocean spear brightness" directly into the vehicle's speech recognition system. As I suspect what3words would require a licensing fee of an OEM that wanted to do this, as it probably won't be used much and as having to say it into your smart phone first isn't that much of an inconvenience I doubt that Rivian or Tesla would spring for this fee. Of the two, Rivian's customers are probably more likely to meet at remote outhouses than Tesla's so perhaps they might be more inclined. Or perhaps the users currently free accounts won't stay free and the OEM might not be charged for the software licence. Or it may be an option paid for by the driver as is the case with Premium Connectivity in the Teslas).

PS; The Mercedes A-class has it (but then Mercedes owns 10% of the company).
 
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I'm still intrigued by this so I donwloaded the App and played with it a bit but I'm still not sure what to do with it. They have an API and Rvian or Tesla or whomever would install that in their cars and the company hoped to make money from charging people like Rivian and Tesla for bulk use of the API. I don't see how they will make a success of it as the algorithm is basically so simple that anyone can put something similar together in a couple of hours (my address in the system I wrote is "poundage.neurone.allots") so that I don't see anything "not obvious" (necessary for a patent) and yet they have their lawyers after anyone who talks about similar algorithms in a public space. It's really just another twist on Maidenhead Squares.

One thing I do wonder about is their claim that each triplet corresponds to a square of 3 m on an edge. It would make more sense to have each triplet correspond to a "rectangle" of some number of seonds of latitude by some number of seconds of longitude. The object, after all, is to encode latitude and lognitude. Quite a bit of extra trouble would be necessary to code to a cell of fixed linear dimension.
 
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The lexicon what3words uses contains 40000 words. 40000^3 = 64 Trillion, way more than all the 3m^2 grids needed to map our planet in what3words
 
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This is the reply received on inquiry of what3words integration into Rivian‘s navigation.....not really an answer

8><.............snip!

Thank you for reaching out to us and being a member of our preorder community! We are constantly working through the details of our applications and features for our vehicles to be ready for the launch of our online configurator later this year. Within the configurator, you’ll be able to see available options such as your favorite color, trim level, infotainment features, battery pack options, and more.

Hopefully this helped give some insight, please let us know if you have any additional questions! Where do you plan to navigate the R1T first?

Stay adventurous,

Justin

~~~~~~~~
On Sunday, September 13, 2020, 8:04 PM "PENFOLD" <> wrote:
I notice that Ford Motor Corp, one of your financial backers is interested/investing in what3words.comtechnology

Will Rivian be integrating what3words into the onboard navigation system of the R1T & R1S?
 

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40000 words means that the first word can quantize longitude to 360*60/40000 = 0.54 minutes of arc which is equivalent to 3283.2 feet at the equator but only 2321 feet at 45 °N. In latitude 40000 words gives you a strip width of half that, 1641.6 feet irrespective of longitude. So the first and second words put you in one of 1.6e9 bins of lat/lon. Now the third word gives you, in each bin, 40000 subbins so you can locate yourself to within one of a total of 6.4e+13 sub-bins with three words. It makes sense, as a bin has, at the equator, double the length in the E-W direction that it does in the N-S direction, to subdivide the bins into floor(sqrt(40000/2)) = 141 rows and 283 columns thus making a sub-bin 3283.2/283 = 11.601 ft (3.54 m) wide in the EW direction at the equator (2.5 m an 45 °N) and 1641.6/141 equals 11.642 ft wide in the N-S direction anywhere. But the point is we don't when actually navigating care which square we are in. We care about the latitude and longitude so we want a system that accurately encodes that. A triplet drawn from a dictionary of 40000 words gives us the precision in lat of 0.114488 seconds and 0.114894 seconds in lon. That's why I question whether the coordinates so specified are really those of patches of constant area or of constant subtense in latitude and longitude.

Edit: Spelled out seconds instead of using " to indicate seconds so they wouldn't be confused with inches and also changed ' to feet so they wouldn't be confused with minutes of arc.
 
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That's the same reply you would get if you asked where the relativity condenser is going to be installed.
Relativiy Condenser?
I thought it was the Retro Encabulator!
 

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I keep thinking about this and the more I do the more I see it as a very clever solution but I still see it as a clever solution looking for a problem. With the Maidenhead Squares there was a problem it solved but I think that problem is long gone.
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