05/15/2016
Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind
Life with IPS
What does it mean to be able to track your movements, in real time, at any location in the world, inside, outside, and underground?
Before we begin, it’s important to point out that — just like GPS — IPS doesn’t necessarily betray your location to third parties. IPS can be entirely local to your smartphone (or other portable navigation device). IPS, like GPS, can establish a location fix completely passively. The whole doomsday scenario of Rockefellers and global megacorps tracking your every move is unlikely to come to fruition without plenty of warning (and ample time to stage a rebellion).
Starting out in the shallow end, IPS would enable a whole new range of “real life analytics” apps. If you love how that Nike+ GPS app tracks your running speed and distance, an IPS version would blow your mind. IPS could track exactly how many steps you take and how many stairs you climb — and calculate, quite precisely, how many calories you burnt in the process. IPS could keep a perfect record of how many minutes you spend in the gym (and on which machines). IPS could tell you how many hours you spend in bed, commuting, in the office, and on the toilet.
The true power of IPS, though, would come from linking your real life analytics to other streams of data, such as social graphs and payment systems. IPS could track where and when you are most likely to use Facebook or Twitter, and tell you which locations are conducive to happy (or sad) status updates. IPS could be used to create beautiful heatmaps of where you spend money; you could even play it back in real time and watch your avatar as it bounces around a Google Map, first to Starbucks, then to the train ticket machine, then to the office vending machine, and so on.
Read more here: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/126843-think-gps-is-cool-ips-will-blow-your-mind/2
For all of its awesome applications, GPS has two fundamental flaws: It doesn't work indoors, and it can't really detect altitude. An Indoor Positioning System would fix that -- and introduce some seriously awesome applications.