Mash Nav

Chris Freestone  29 September 2008 19:59:44

Two weeks off and the batteries are fully recharged. However there are still certain things that I find myself pondering over regardless of how little practical sense it makes... when really my brain should be switching itself off and reducing its carbon footprint.

Last week, I found myself on a long road trip without my TomTom (cardinal sin - I know) - not even my mobile phone. But given that it was a journey I had done hundreds of times wasn't overly concerned about it. It's amazing how much you miss something when you need it - sure enough there was an accident on the opposite side of the road causing the motorway to close - meaning that on my return journey I would have to find an alternate route. I ended up spending 7 hours in the car that day on what should have been a 3 hour round trip, way too much time on my hands...

For a while now I've pondered over the concept of CarPCs. This is not a new idea, but given that I have yet to experience it - I still dream up new applications for such a gadget (iNotes Ultralite strikes me as being perfect for those in-dash VGA touchscreens). Now, obviously there is Sat Nav software that can be purchased that will hook in to a USB/Bluetooth GPS receiver - but where's the fun in that ? Surely with the advent of these all you can eat mobile broadband deals, a CarPC should be able to have full internet access for the duration of any journey by using your handset as a modem (assuming the handset supports such a feature like my old brick the Fujitsu Siemens Loox T830).

It struck me though, surely information like traffic must be available as a useable feed, and having done a couple of IBM Mashup Center POCs based on mapping I know that the Google Maps API gives you classes to programmatically retrieve directions between pont A and point B. I'd also need a java applet to hook into the COM port for a USB GPS device to use as the plot point within the map. Combine all this with a Text To Speech API (along with some quality voices such as AT&T's Natural Voices) and you have a mashup that can steer you around any traffic jam in the country...

Unable to find anything like it on ProgrammableWeb, I decided to look into this a little further and discovered that sure enough the BBC publish their UK traffic information in both RSS and TPEG format. The RSS is good but the TPEGML does offer GPS coordinates for the accidents (handy for icon placement on the map).

So then, I'll need iWidgets for :

1) The GPS applet Widget to wire the current coordinates to the map to relate to the next set of directions
2) Google Maps API Map Widget to display the map (would look nice with the Google Earth Plugin), route, current coords and traffic blocks
3) Google Maps API Directions Widget to manage the step by step instructions, and read them out through TTS
4) Traffic Conditions Processing Widget to periodically pull in the traffic data and wire the data ove rthe the directions widget

Seems feasible enough right ? Somehow I suspect calculating routes around traffic might be a tad challenge unless Google Maps has some means of catering for this - a work in progress I feel, and not likely to get to the top of my To Do list anytime soon.

It would make for a cool technology demo though, so maybe I'll see how things pan out.

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