[HN Gopher] A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
___________________________________________________________________
A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
Author : MBCook
Score : 949 points
Date : 2024-04-16 02:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (maphappenings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maphappenings.com)
| myself248 wrote:
| I have a fantasy that someone reverse-engineers the tape data
| format and is able to render new maps to it. For the 2 etak
| systems still operational out there...
| skykooler wrote:
| What happened to the original units? Are there any left?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Apparently Computer History Museum has one, catalog number
| 102766595, "Gift of Stan Honey". Stan Honey founded Etak.
|
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10276659...
| Animats wrote:
| I have several of the gyro and inclinometer units, and the
| magnetometer compass, somewhere. The gyro was a motor spinning
| a flexible metal plate. As the vehicle moved, the plate would
| flex, and sensing the plate's position gave a rough turn rate.
| The inclinometer was a little sealed cup with four capacitive
| sensing plates. I was looking into using this for a robotics
| application, but it was too big for an R/C car sized vehicle.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I'm surprised they had a gyro (the article also only mentions
| a compass, which makes sense to remove accumulated errors in
| heading). I would have expected the wheel sensors to provide
| data of similar quality as a gyro back then, without the
| cost.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Etak Navigator Tour and Demo [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202425 - July 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak 's 1985 Car Navigation System_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744825 - Feb 2017 (83
| comments)
| teeray wrote:
| What is the style of UI used in that device and why did it have
| that characteristic angular look? I've seen it on other devices
| of the same vintage.
| izme wrote:
| It's a vector display, similar to how an oscilloscope display
| works. Check out the Vectrex video game console for another
| great example.
| nickt wrote:
| I love the look. They'll be vector displays.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
| lxgr wrote:
| Do you maybe mean a vector monitor?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
| klooney wrote:
| Vector Graphics Display- you draw with lines instead of pixels.
| rescbr wrote:
| The style is an artifact/limitation of using a vector display.
|
| Compare to today's ubiquity of a raster display. Why did they
| choose to use a vector display? Maybe to decrease cost and
| avoid placing framebuffer memory? Maybe rendering maps directly
| to a vector display could be faster by skipping a rasterization
| process? Any other reason?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Maps are intrinsically vector data, and a raster graphics
| display back then would have been low-res, 320x240 at most,
| making the map (and text!) really difficult to read. And then
| you'd need the rasterizer itself, using precious CPU cycles
| and memory bandwidth to turn perfect mathematical line
| segments into crude pixelated approximations. And yes, the
| memory needed for the framebuffer was also likely an issue.
| The question is more, why would they ever have used a raster
| monitor? None of the advantages of raster were applicable,
| and the disadvantages were all relevant in their use case.
| The 100% obvious choice was vector.
| guenthert wrote:
| All true.
|
| > None of the advantages of raster were applicable
|
| Colour might have been nice though.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Atari's Star Wars had a colour vector display two years
| before the Etak was released.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I believe a vector CRT could be color just like a raster
| CRT can, using three phosphors and three electron beams
| (sure, technically that would've made the monitor a
| vector-raster hybrid). That would've raised the cost even
| higher, which I assume was the main reason the system was
| monochrome. Sure, you couldn't easily render filled
| geometry with a vector display, but it wouldn't have been
| anywhere near feasible with a raster monitor either given
| the puny hardware.
| toast0 wrote:
| I think a vector display makes it easier to rotate the map.
| gyomu wrote:
| It's a vector display.
|
| Perhaps one of the most widespread device that used a vector
| display was the original Asteroids arcade game.
|
| There's a functioning machine at the Alamo Drafthouse in San
| Francisco (at least there was last time I went there), I can't
| help but stare at it (and give a mini display history lesson to
| friends) every time I go. Those lines are just so crisp and
| bright and beautiful.
| dracyr wrote:
| Yeah, it's always so cool looking. The device is using a CRT
| vector display, so instead of the CRT drawing each pixel row
| line by line, each shape on the screen is drawn one by one as
| small line segments. Curves are also possible, but you'd have
| to formulate the vector shape for it, which is harder than for
| straight lines.
|
| It also looks even cooler in person, as the refresh rate is
| also really good due to the CRTs, if there's an old arcade
| close with Asteroids or similar early vector games I'd really
| recommend going to see it.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Did that interface inspire the PipBoy in the first Fallout game
| 12 years later?
| treve wrote:
| It's possible, but it's also similar to other vector graphics
| from the time.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| There were CRT based in-car record keeping systems used in
| police cars for a long time before laptops replaced them which
| had a very similar form factor.
| ramigb wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing but I searched if someone
| else mentioned it. so thank you :D insane nostalgia
| jandrese wrote:
| It is amazing that they got it to work as well as it did given
| how it was 15-20 years ahead of its time. Sure the unit ended up
| costing as much as the car it was mounted in, but given the
| limitations of the technology of the time that is simply amazing.
| To get an idea of how ahead of its time this is, it wouldn't be
| until a year after the release that High Sierra formatting for
| CD-ROMs would be proposed. A CD Drive would have added even more
| expense, but it should would have beat out swapping around dozens
| of cassettes.
|
| I wonder how much memory it had. The contemporary PC-XT using the
| same chip started out with 128kb but could be expanded to 640kb.
| One can imagine it had to page data in and out of that slow
| cassette interface quite regularly as you're driving around.
| xixixao wrote:
| It was $4000 in today's dollars, unlikely that it would have
| been installed in such a cheap car (1985 car prices[0]).
|
| Interesting that it cost about as much as the Apple Vision Pro.
| Probably had way more utility for its buyers.
|
| [0]
| https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/01hile...
| defrost wrote:
| etak (navigation):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak_(navigation)
| a word of Micronesian origin for a distinctive cognitive and
| mnemonic approach to oceanic navigation and orientation involving
| a notional reference point or "island", called etak, and
| triangulation based on it. ... the use of a relative
| frame, in which the boat is considered to be at rest, while the
| etak moves.
| SamBam wrote:
| The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used
| by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island
| to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it
| operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA).
|
| The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and
| ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating
| by dead reckoning over long distances is that if you're a
| fraction of a degree off you may miss your destination and never
| know it, so it's also vitally important to know how far you've
| gone. This is hard when there are no landmarks. The navigators
| estimated their distance by using intermediary islands off to the
| side, which they viewed as coming towards them (from their point
| of view, the navigator stays motionless on the open ocean while
| the world moves towards them) and past them. These reference
| islands were called _etaks_.
|
| However, confusingly, the _etaks_ were generally not visible,
| being beyond the horizon, and sometimes did not even exist. The
| navigators would have named _etaks_ that they pictured being just
| over the horizon, whether they were there or not, and would track
| their procession past their boat. When the set number of _etaks_
| had passed, they would know they were in the vicinity of the
| destination island. If they were not at the right time of day for
| birds to be out, they would then hang out in the area waiting to
| spot the birds leaving or returning at dawn or dusk.
|
| So the system involves dead reckoning plus a system of turning
| the navigators' own well-developed intuition of how far they had
| travelled into a formalized system of generally-invisible islands
| that they used as a mental model to externalize this intuition.
|
| (My knowledge of this is from _Cognition in the wild_ , Hutchins,
| E., 1995.)
|
| _Edit:_ D 'oh, I should have finished TFA. This is described at
| the end, although more roughly.
| Affric wrote:
| Thank you for the fascinating comment and book recommendation.
|
| Felt the article was heavy on ad copy and graphics.
| Thtjifiti wrote:
| This sounds very romantic, but they were mostly at drift. Most
| very using rafts without any form of propulsion. "Navigation"
| across wast distances was one way road with no return ticket.
| They had to do it for overpopulation, not for some explorative
| spirit.
| niccl wrote:
| I think there's a large Maori population in Aotearoa that
| would disagree with this. Heyerdahl's theory was discredited
| a while ago
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Granted, overpopulation drove much, but if it was all one way
| drifting, then why would the Hawai'ians have a channel named
| "the way to Tahiti"?
|
| see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokule`a
| Affric wrote:
| Do you have a source for your claims?
| jollyllama wrote:
| >They had to do it for overpopulation, not for some
| explorative spirit.
|
| Navigation methods aside, those aren't mutually exclusive.
| wiml wrote:
| I don't have references easily to hand but I don't think
| that's true. Polynesian navigators were able to make repeat
| journeys to the same destination reliably enough to return
| home and build maps and train successors in their craft.
| SamBam wrote:
| There is plenty of evidence that Pacific Islanders were able
| to navigate from island to island, for example in the book I
| cited above. Here's more [1]. What's your evidence for them
| not being able to?
|
| Honestly, this sounds like some crap spread by people who
| can't bring themselves to believe that non-Western "primitive
| people" could have highly developed skills.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
| ianburrell wrote:
| The Polynesians used double-hulled canoes not rafts. King
| Kamehameha conquered the Hawaiian island using giant canoes
| with accounts from Westerners.
|
| The system of navigation was recorded orally. People in
| living memory retained the knowledge. Anthropologists got it
| from them, built replica canoes, and then sailed around
| discovering that it worked. Captain Cook used Polynesian
| navigator who was well traveled.
|
| Maybe the rafts are coming from Easter Island losing the
| technology and using rafts instead.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| It only happened in the late middle ages, after possibly
| millenia of experience navigating easier waters. They simply
| didn't teach their methods to anyone
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Another book specifically about the Polynesian navigators is
| The Last Navigator. Having no experience navigating at sea,
| parts of it were a bit over my head, but it was a great read.
| It also goes into the culture of the people who are the subject
| of the book.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh, I thought it was just the name "Kate" reversed.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I've read somewhere that part of the method they intuited their
| way was to read the waves. As faraway land masses can affect
| the shape of waves, supposedly these navigators could "see"
| beyond the horizon due to how the swell was behaving.
|
| I can sort of see that in a mind's eye, with rings of waves
| spreading as they bounce off obstacles in water. But that's
| bird's view of a miniature -- and seeing that from the surface
| would be a very different story.
| bix6 wrote:
| https://worldhistorycommons.org/marshall-islands-stick-chart
|
| It's amazing they can read such nuance.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Look at something long enough, and you begin to intuit the
| patterns instinctively.
| sneak wrote:
| Instinctive things are things the entire species are born
| with. Things you pick up via experience ("nurture") can
| never be "instinctive".
| resolutebat wrote:
| Instincts are not limited to natural instincts.
|
| > 1. A natural or inherent impulse or behaviour.
|
| > 2. An intuitive reaction not based on rational
| conscious thought.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm reminded of something that I heard someone say once
| in an interview--intuition is just memory in disguise.
| Certainly, in some areas of my life, my strategy is to
| learn things and forget them to be able to use them. It
| doesn't work in all arenas (mathematics really demands
| explicit remembering much of the time, but I find
| programming and writing both work well with forgotten
| remembering).
| Akronymus wrote:
| It seems I was mixing up instinctive and intuitive.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I think more than viewing a ring of waves bounce of objects
| in the water, they observed waves diffracting around an
| island
| ljf wrote:
| As a young child I went mackerel fishing on a small boat in
| Shetland with my father and a local he knew.
|
| The man steered the boat with one had in the water, until
| he announced we were near a shoal of mackerel - he said he
| could feel the grease of their bodies in the sea water.
|
| We threw some lines in and sure enough we caught plenty of
| fish for dinner.
| buildsjets wrote:
| I used to fish for salmon quite a bit. Herring schools
| release enough oil into the water to visibly affect the
| wave action at the surface. You can also smell it.
| andai wrote:
| I heard that polynesians, when asked (in the context of
| setting out on deadly journeys in wooden boats) "how did you
| know there would be land there" said "we read the waves".
|
| They could see from the patterns in the waves, thousands of
| miles away, where the land masses were.
|
| >insert joke about training neural networks
|
| (If anyone knows the original quotes, please post below.)
| sdwr wrote:
| These two comments together explain what was mysterious and
| spooky.
| zeteo wrote:
| That sounds fascinating, but it's not really clear to me how
| imagining islands beyond the horizon can help with dead
| reckoning. Maybe there are changes in observable phenomena,
| such as ocean currents, that are associated with these unseen
| islands? It does sound like a very complex system based on the
| beginning of this article; I'm wondering if anyone here has
| read the books mentioned in it:
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/20705519
| zeteo wrote:
| I've found a bit more information about the topic in a
| publicly available research article [1]:
|
| "A depth of only 25 fathoms is quite enough to give some
| surface indications: coloration, wave phenomena, perhaps
| fauna. Is this the explanation of the ghost island? Some lost
| traveller, perhaps en route from Yap to Guam, seeing and
| remembering these phenomena, later reifying them as an
| inhabited land? Or is it possible that a real island once
| existed here, as the Carolinians say? [...] Any Carolinian
| navigator worthy of the name can give a whole set of
| radiating courses under all the navigation stars from every
| island of the Carolines, not just from Kaafiror. [...
| N]avigators do learn them, together with the courses from
| real islands, and they make no distinction among them. It is
| perhaps not altogether in the realm of fantasy to speculate
| that the curriculum of the schools of navigation was
| established in a time when Kaafifor was more than a
| discolored patch of water."
|
| [1] https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/the_ghost_isl
| and...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| You know how if you turn the light on for a second you can
| then move through a dark room without touching anything?
|
| The boundary between "imagining" and "visualizing" is
| somewhere between these two experiences but conceptually they
| are not that different.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yeah, this surprised me as well. I get how reading ocean
| swells, sea life, birds, ocean color (indicating depth and/or
| plant life below) could give a general sense of position. And
| I can see how stars, prevailing currents and maybe even
| estimates based on the relative movement of clouds (adjusted
| for ambient wind direction and weather conditions) could give
| a general sense of distance traveled. But on a completely
| cloudless day (or fully overcast night) gauging distance
| traveled seems like it could be catastrophically imprecise
| often enough to make for short navigation careers.
|
| I'm not sure how the concept of tracking virtual islands over
| the horizon really helps. The only thing I can think of is
| maybe the idea of it encourages the navigator to stay focused
| on estimating the passage of proxy points on the far horizon
| based on whatever composite of wind, current and swell signs
| they are intuiting from. While still quite variable, I assume
| gauging distance estimates on the far horizon is better than
| the alternative of trying to estimate distance traveled from
| the immediate surroundings of the craft (which are only
| useful for estimating velocity).
| toast0 wrote:
| > I'm not sure how the concept of tracking virtual islands
| over the horizon really helps. The only thing I can think
| of is maybe the idea of it encourages the navigator to stay
| focused on estimating the passage of proxy points on the
| far horizon
|
| You can practice navagating against physical islands over
| the horizon, and when you're good at that, you've mostly
| gotten good at dead reckoning against a real reference
| point; of course, with corrections from the islands
| influence. Having a community shared archipelego of virtual
| islands lets you focus your dead reckoning skills on a
| point while offering a vocabulary of distance and reducing
| travel times between waypoints.
|
| Go 1000 miles in this direction seems a lot harder for me
| to follow over many days than go X miles to A, then Y miles
| to B, then Z miles to C. Even if A and B aren't real. If I
| treat them as very small islands that will be over the
| horizon, no big deal that they don't influence the
| environment, they're small; but I can't really use them to
| course correct, my reckoning needs to be good.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is a great point, and exactly analogous to waypoints
| used in aviation navigation, mostly for departure and
| approach patterns.
| pierrebai wrote:
| The explanation could be a combination of experience,
| details, survivor bias and true scottman.
|
| That is with experience you can select something on the ocean
| far away that you can track (kelp, etc), with experience and
| focus to accurately track it and take into account its own
| movement. Then the method is obviously only promoted by those
| who successfully survived using it, as the potential nay-
| sayers who used it and failed are no longer there to give a
| counter-point. Finally, those who did not use it successfully
| are probably characterized as "not good navigators", in
| circular logic.
| sisyphus_coding wrote:
| What is TFA?
| hollerith wrote:
| The fine article. In this case,
| https://maphappenings.com/2024/04/11/story-of-etak/
| neilv wrote:
| 1991 home video demo of an Etak, in a custom housing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCCjlSWbHE?t=1m50s
|
| (Bet they didn't think at the time that techies of the future
| would be watching it in 2024 on the ubiquitous global data
| network.)
| delichon wrote:
| We had a ubiquitous continental data network back then. You can
| see it in operation in the old historical film, "You've Got
| Mail". The floppy installation disks were so plentiful they
| probably form a sedimentary stratum future geologists will use
| to identify the era.
| neilv wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking the people who were showing this
| advanced tech thing were also likely the ones who could
| extrapolate where online was going.
|
| But did they imagine that many techies a few decades in the
| future would be interested in the home video they were
| making?
| fragmede wrote:
| only as much as you think Kubernetes will be a historical
| fascination 200 years from now.
| saulpw wrote:
| That was 1995. In 1991, we had the ubiquitous
| intercontinental phone network, but overseas connections were
| >$1/minute and data rate was only 9600 baud.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Stretching the definition a little, satellite TV had been a
| thing for years by then. Neiman Marcus was selling
| satellite dishes in 1979.
| vitiral wrote:
| Satellite TV, being unidirectional, can hardly be called
| communication.
| supportengineer wrote:
| There was a satellite ISP for a time. The satellite box
| had a modem in it and your outbound traffic went out over
| the modem and the inbound traffic came down to the dish.
| efreak wrote:
| One-way communication is still communication. Broadcast
| TV is still used today.
| atemerev wrote:
| Still, email and usenet sort of worked. I have sent my
| first international email in 1993, from a school lab in my
| home town in Siberia. In larger cities, I bet there were
| ways to do it even earlier.
| madcoderme wrote:
| Your last line immediately made me think. probably in near
| future, techies of the future would say something similar about
| our achievements, maybe gpt, or 4 qbit quantum computer.
| 10729287 wrote:
| ...and enjoy such a cute and naive retro technology. "Ah !
| Good old times".
| fragmede wrote:
| PCs and their games from the 90's are already retro gaming.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I just love the look of vector displays and I wish they were
| more common still today. Such a cool aesthetic!
| ddingus wrote:
| Me too. Atari, toward the end, had even mastered color vector
| displays that look excellent!
|
| Look for clips of "Star Wars" in action.
|
| The 70's was anni interesting time. Atari was employing
| dynamic vector displays capable of real time motion.
|
| Tektronix was using vectors with their storage CRT tech.
| Basically the vectors got painted onto the tube phosphors,
| thus displaying the image without the need to refresh.
|
| 4k resolution (vector coordinate space) ended up being a
| thing!
|
| https://youtu.be/f8I8TtK_6sw?si=LQ1sZK6jt0QKhMNX
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I played Star Wars at a Chuck E Cheese as a kid. The
| cabinet was impressive too; done up like a cockpit with a
| flight yoke.
| YouWhy wrote:
| Highly inspiring! Will share with my team (and I don't do that
| often!)
|
| It seems that Etak was to navigation systems what Jodorowsky's
| Dune was to 1980s sci-fi: a trail blazing endeavour that was wild
| and wildly innovative, did not fulfill its intended mission but
| rather set up an entire field for subsequent success.
|
| Also: the design must have included several masterpieces when
| considering the state of tech in the 1980s: even seeking to the
| right point on the map cassette is an untrivially hard problem.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Do you mean David Lynch's Dune? Jodorowsky's attempt was in the
| 70s and was never released.
| YouWhy wrote:
| I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product,
| albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther
| along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way
| in development.
|
| What I wanted to point out is that both projects produced
| massive amounts of reusable knowledge, and that knowledge set
| up the stage for a whole field of influential and exciting
| derivative works.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional
| product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is
| farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled
| mid-way in development.
|
| You seem to be responding to another comment? Or are
| putting words in the commenters' mouth?
| YouWhy wrote:
| I was responding to the "Jodorowsky's attempt was ...
| never released" critique by trying to expand on both the
| similarities and dissimilarities between Etak and
| Jodorowsky's Dune.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| My comment wasn't really about Etak at all, I just
| thought you might have mixed up Jodorowsky's Dune with
| Lynch's! The Lynch one seemed like a better fit, although
| I think "set up an entire field for subsequent success"
| is a bit of a stretch for both of them.
| austinprete wrote:
| The documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune" presents a fairly
| strong argument that the "Dune bible" that was assembled
| for that movie and shopped around to production studios
| strongly influenced many of the great sci-fi films (or at
| least iconic scenes in them) in the years to follow.
|
| Specific examples from the documentary were Star Wars and
| Alien. The latter of which included Dan O'Bannon
| (screenwriter) and H.R. Giger (effects+concept artist),
| reprising their roles as staff on Jodorowsky's Dune.
|
| Highly recommend the documentary by the way. I actually
| just saw it a couple weeks ago, so the comparison made a
| lot of sense to me.
| lbrindze wrote:
| Stan Honey other claim to fame (other than being literally the
| best yacht navigator, probably ever) was founding Sportsvision,
| the company that created the yellow 1st down line you see when
| you watch football on tv.
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| Back in the day the first "computer graphics" class we had at uni
| was on a tektronix 4010. You would build 3D models and rotate
| them and display the movement on the monitor. This was when all
| screens were green text only in a time share system.
| mvkel wrote:
| Fantastic story.
|
| > When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were
| Etak alumni.
|
| What a legacy! It's gratifying to hear of these long-dead
| companies/products with incredible engineers who are still out
| there slinging code with the best of them.
| stavros wrote:
| > incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code
| with the best of them.
|
| I'd think that it's _everyone else_ at Apple who 's slinging
| code with the best of them.
| mvkel wrote:
| Yes, sorry. That's exactly what I meant to say! Pioneers.
| epstein wrote:
| Now I understand why apple maps so bad.
| trillic wrote:
| Stan Honey, heavily mentioned in the article, most famous for
| his contributions to sailing, also built the yellow first down
| line graphic were used to seeing in American football.
| teleforce wrote:
| >Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that
| changes everything. Or so said Steve Jobs when he announced
| iPhone in 2007.
|
| Interestingly, one of Etak co-founders was Nolan Bushnell, and he
| was Atari co-founder that hired Steve Jobs (or specifically Allan
| Alcorn) in his only full-time job prior to Apple, pardon the pun.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Not to mention the founder of that most estimable chain,
| _Charles Entertainment Cheese 's Pizza Time Theatre_.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| A very long time ago (~1996-1997) I worked for a company in
| Sunnyvale called Vicinity which made mapblast, a website now so
| lost to time that google will assume you are typoing mapquest
| if you search for it. The company was eventually sold (well
| after I had left) to Microsoft and became part of MSN I
| believe.
|
| The tech behind mapblast also powered the first version of
| Yahoo Maps, which was a pretty big deal at the time (this was
| before Google Maps eventually came in and overshadowed everyone
| else in that market).
|
| I was in my early 20s and working for one of my first tech
| startups at the time but Vicinity was primarily made up of
| graybeards who had previously worked for Etak (who was the
| primary map data provider for the online mapping system we
| made, so they had a lot of experience with it) and many of
| those people were also ex-Atari prior to Etak.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Being buried by Google because there's a more marketable
| search result isn't the same as being lost to time. Not yet
| anyway
| apetresc wrote:
| Sorry, what's the pun? I can't find it.
| thombat wrote:
| Guessing that it's Jobs' job?
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > To solve this problem Etak invented 'augmented dead reckoning'.
| This used a process to match the position given by the navigation
| sensors to a topologically correct electronic map. Whenever the
| vehicle turned you made the assumption that you're driving on a
| road. At that point the location could be 'snapped' back to the
| road and the error from the sensors could be reset. This
| technique was later adopted by all navigation apps and is still
| in use today.
|
| No way did they invent this. Not even close!
|
| This is called map matching. It predates Etak by at least 20
| years, if not more.
|
| This paper was published a decade before which does exactly this:
| Lezniak TW, Lewis RW, Mcmillen RA. A dead reckoning/map
| correlation system for automatic vehicle tracking. IEEE
| Transactions on Vehicular Technology. 1977 Feb;26(1):47-60.
|
| The government was building out this technology in the 50s,
| here's a RAND report about that.
| https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/Portals/67/documents/...
|
| I suspect there are even earlier examples.
| kqr wrote:
| This was my sense as well. The device looks and is described
| like something I would not be surprised to find on a 1970s
| warship or spy plane to aid navigation. Not with street maps,
| specifically, of course, but something similar!
|
| Still impressive to get it into a consumer-sized (and almost
| consumer-priced) box.
| lsaferite wrote:
| I mean, if that paper wasn't declassified until 2017, what are
| they chances they knew about the prior art exactly?
|
| I'm not disputing your assertion, but perhaps I'm a little more
| charitable in thinking they could have independently invented
| the same thing and believed they were the first since the one
| you mentioned was apparently classified.
| MBCook wrote:
| Right. Independent invention happens all the time.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| The other paper I showed was always public over a decade
| before.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Unfortunately, I cannot access the paper and as such cannot
| give any meaningful feedback.
|
| Edit: Funnily enough, searching on google for this paper,
| your comment is the second result.
| lsaferite wrote:
| As an aside, wanting me to pay $33 to read a PDF of a
| paper from 46 years ago is... unfortunate. (I have a list
| of other words I'd rather use, but I'm being civil)
| golergka wrote:
| One thing I notice about the 80s is that people were much more
| willing to pay top dollar for first, very limited versions of
| products. $4000 in todays money is almost the same as Apple
| Vision Pro, for a product that has very limited usability.
|
| May be it was easier to market only for rich people who wish to
| show off then? Since the fall of Vertu no tech companies seem to
| address specifically this segment. Or may be people just were
| more optimistic about tech?
| Centigonal wrote:
| Is that true, though? Etak had to license their tech and court
| a buyer shortly after going to market. Meanwhile, Apple has
| sold over 200k Vision Pro headsets.
| guenthert wrote:
| > One thing I notice about the 80s is that people were much
| more willing to pay top dollar for first, very limited versions
| of products.
|
| I'd rather think that there is more money frivolously spent
| today; in the S.F. Bay Area, much more.
|
| > May be it was easier to market only for rich people who wish
| to show off then?
|
| I'm quite perplexed about how your perception can be so very
| different from mine. How many people own a Tesla in your
| neighborhood?
|
| This device however, I would have thought, would have been
| marketed chiefly to professionals. Traveling salesmen, doctors
| (who then still made house calls), service technicians etc. .
| LaundroMat wrote:
| That the system would only show you your destination, but not how
| to get there is very appealing to me (as well as its display).
|
| I'd pay for a CRT Waze skin and the option to turn off turn-by-
| turn navigation.
| moffkalast wrote:
| And then you'd play "I'm Tickled Pink" on the speakers with not
| enough bass and drive your Chryslus Corvega into the sunset? :P
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > The second key invention was a 'heading up', moving map
| display. This meant that the vehicle remained at the center of
| the screen and the map moved and turned under the vehicle. What
| you saw ahead of you in the windshield was what was displayed on
| the screen. This proved highly intuitive.
|
| Later on they talk about "heads up" map digitizing, did this mean
| the map rotated as the operator digitized the street? Seems quite
| unwieldy (and how did the poor PC rotate raster graphics?)
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't think so... I think heads up for the digitizing
| indicates that the digital map was overlayed on top of the
| (scanned) source image? As opposed to digitizing from a paper
| map where you have the map on a surface in front of you, and a
| digital map hopefully on a screen in front of you (but they did
| say some were digitizing blind before this?) and you're trying
| to get the digitized version right by looking between the two.
|
| For the in car map, a vector CRT and vector data makes rotation
| reasonable. Much less hard than rotating rasterized scanned
| images on a PC with no rotation acceleration.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| I'm guessing the 'blind' method looked something like using
| one of the early graphics tablets to trace routes or tap
| control points on a paper map according to a sequence
| displayed on a text terminal, with no graphical feedback to
| confirm the vector data during input.
| em-bee wrote:
| in 1988 i was doing an internship at a company designing
| ship propulsion systems. they had a CAD computer with with
| a huge screen and tablet. not sure how old that device was
| or how expensive but i guess in '85 the technology was not
| far away.
|
| digitizing blind at that point would mostly be used because
| it was cheaper than getting a graphics capable computer.
|
| using a projector instead of a screen would be enough to
| devise a system where the digital image is shown on top of
| a printed map. so when they came up with that idea they
| probably already had most of the pieces they need to make
| it work.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Yes, the map rotated in real time with the vehicle centered. I
| was a software developer writing software using Etak in '88-'89
| time frame. That only worked when focused on a single vehicle,
| as I remember writing the code to do the same for groups of
| vehicles and Etak wanted to purchase that code from my
| employer. they probably got it, as my lead developer I worked
| for ended up working at Etak after I left.
|
| Interesting side-fact: we used time-of-flight with beepers
| placed in the cars and ordinary trigonometry to increase
| accuracy. Worked like a charm.
| sovok_x wrote:
| Heads up map digitizing seem to refer to the method where
| computer operator digitized an aerial image map by manually
| tagging its features displayed on the screen, in contrast to
| heads down digitizing where they used a special tablet.
|
| Anyway I really need such articles from time to time not to
| lose my faith in humanity.
| mark-r wrote:
| Rotating raster graphics is easy and the technique was well
| known at the time, see for example
| https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~fricke/projects/israel/paeth/r...
| . A PC was easily capable of it. Maybe not in real time as
| we're used to today, but quick enough that it wouldn't be an
| impediment.
| jkillick wrote:
| Heads up digitizing means digitizing the road vectors on top of
| an image. In Etak's case we used 5 bits to display the image
| and 3 bits to display the vectors on top. Prior to this
| invention people used a method of tablet digitizing (similar to
| https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets) which was
| much slower and more error prone (and thus less accurate).
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Bosch EVA (1983)
|
| _" The prototype driver navigation system was unveiled in
| Hildesheim on June 21, 1983, and it proved groundbreaking: EVA
| was the first ever experimental autonomous navigation system."_
|
| https://www.bosch.com/stories/eva-first-navigation-system-fr...
|
| (no map, but display and address to address with route finding)
| sllabres wrote:
| Very interesting, i've just yesterday wrote about the successor
| of EVA, the TravelPilot IDS [1] which was commercially
| available. But I didn't knew that there was another system 5
| years ahead.
|
| Both (Etak and TravelPilot IDS) seems to use kind of a vector
| display. Does someone know if this is for better resolution or
| better contrast, or both or if there is another reason?
|
| https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-sys...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| There is no conventional resolution to vector displays
| (though monitors have limitations).
|
| Reminds me at one point in time I owned a Vectrex, which had
| much cleaner lines than any other console, even much better
| than my later, much more expensive Amiga or (early) PCs.
|
| "This Vectrex does things I never thought possible"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM
|
| Only got that feeling back with Retina displays.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I worked at the company that made the Vectrex, Jay Smith
| was a wonderful guy. Super brilliant too: the world of PSX
| Bowling games was his creation, he wrote the first bowling
| physics sim using Excel, and we hired some guy with a PhD
| in Statistics who wrote Jay's algorithm in assembly for the
| PSX, and the 3D bowling genre was launched.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| <3
| astrobe_ wrote:
| I wonder what was the state of navigation systems for planes at
| this time, because among the car GPS brands, one finds for
| instance Garmin, which is an avionics company.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The article claims that the "match roads by turns" technique "was
| later adopted by all navigation apps". Does anyone know if this
| is true? My impression was that they rely on GPS position only
| for positioning, even though modern phone hardware should give
| really nice gyroscope/accelerometer data.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Virtually all car navigation software, or phone GPS apps in
| driving mode, will "snap" to a nearby road if the GPS indicates
| that you are traveling parallel to one. This compensates for
| minor GPS reception errors.
|
| This can _occasionally_ , in rare situations, be a problem, if
| you have frontage roads very close to a highway, they can
| sometimes get confused about which road you are actually on.
| guenthert wrote:
| In car navigation software it's not all that rare. Chances
| are the maps are out of date, perhaps by quite a few years
| (because manufacturers ask for absurd prices on map updates)
| and you're traveling on a road which doesn't yet exist on the
| map ...
| hoseja wrote:
| It LOVES to happen on complicated in-construction off-grade
| intersections, where you usually need the navigation the
| most.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I love when I've been traveling at highway speed down a
| highway for over an hour, and suddenly my GPS starts giving
| me directions back to the highway from some nearby parallel
| road when I haven't so much as passed an exit.
| myself248 wrote:
| It's incessant for me; a significant part of one of my
| frequent routes is on the service-drive that parallels a
| major freeway, after taking an exit, but prior to diverging.
| Depending on traffic, though, it may also be advantageous to
| stay on the freeway, so both are valid parts of the route.
|
| If Waze instructs me to take the exit, then it assumes I'm on
| the service drive, even if GPS says I'm still on the freeway.
| And vice-versa, more problematically -- if I impulsively take
| the exit, it assumes I'm still on the freeway even if GPS
| clearly shows I'm on the service drive.
|
| (I can confirm this by running a spare laptop with a USB GPS
| as a logger, while my iPhone runs Waze. Overlay the GPX on a
| map later and it's super obvious whether I took the exit or
| not, but either the Apple location provider or Waze staunchly
| ignores reality in favor of obsessive road snapping.)
|
| Where this gets stupid is, if there's a traffic jam on the
| freeway and I dip onto the exit to avoid it, now Waze sees me
| flowing freely down the service drive, assumes that it's the
| freeway that's flowing freely, and disbelieves other users
| who report traffic there. Even as the service drive curves
| and diverges and I follow the curve, it doesn't retroactively
| say "Oh jeez, he must be on the service drive after all,
| adjust the previous data to apply to the service drive and
| not to the freeway!". So the bad data continues to corrupt
| the traffic picture and encourage other users to get stuck in
| traffic they can't report.
| mariusor wrote:
| I interpreted that to mean that any error in GPS coordinates
| will be snapped to the closest road that matches the direction
| vector. (At the same time, I doubt my understanding since I've
| seen plenty of navigation systems show the vehicle not on the
| road when traveling on less well covered GPS areas).
| incorrecthorse wrote:
| Most modern navigation apps continue working in tunnels and
| other places without GPS. It's more like GPS augmented with
| dead reckoning.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Is that sensor based dead reckoning or simple interpolation
| based on the previous (or expected) speed of travel along the
| route though?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| GPS and other signals aren't continuous, they all use dead
| reckoning to fill in the blanks in between. This was even more
| of a necessity with early smartphones and navigation systems
| that only had GPS; nowadays they can use a combination of GPS,
| GSS, Gallileo, GPS and wifi networks. The latter was a
| secondary goal of the Google Street View project, matching GPS
| / location with wifi signals.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Your list should be: GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, GLONASS, and Wifi.
| Probably cellular too.
| stavros wrote:
| When nearing a turn you're supposed to take, try stopping
| completely and rotating your phone as if you're in the turn.
| Google Maps will continue into the turn before correcting back
| to the place you stopped. It doesn't do this if you don't
| rotate the phone.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Try googling GPS "Lock on Road" for some examples.
| wengo314 wrote:
| > The cassette tape in an Etak Navigator was read at about 200cm
| (80'') per second!
|
| i struggle to imagine how did the tape handle it.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| That must be a typo, has to be. That's, what, 20-80 rotations
| per second for a regular cassette tape?!
| webstrand wrote:
| I found it in the official brochure from Etak printed in
| 1984, it says "80 ips" <http://honeynav.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/01/brochure-Worl...>
| webstrand wrote:
| I found a contemporary source <http://archive.informationdispla
| y.org/Portals/InformationDis...>
|
| > Compact tape drive. which uses 1/4-in. magnetic tape
| cassettes operating at 80 ips, each containing every street and
| specific address, for an area about twice that of an ordinary
| paper street map, as well as overviews of major state and
| regional roads, and national interstates (installed under the
| vehicle dashboard or in the glove compartment).
|
| So it seems that, if it's not 80 inches per second, then the
| confusion dates at least back to 1985!
|
| another source
| <https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf> also
| reports:
|
| > TAPE DRIVE
|
| > 5" x 2 3/4" x 3 3/4" 80 ips
| rasz wrote:
| > 1/4-in. magnetic tape
|
| Tape shown in the video demonstration of Etak was ordinary
| 1/8 Philips 4 x 2 1/2 x 1/2.
|
| >another source
| <https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/2332/dot_2332_DS1.pdf>
|
| Dimensions are for a Tape Drive so that matches Philips
| cassette. Speed is 40x normal, but reading https://www.thereg
| ister.com/Print/2013/08/30/50_years_of_the...
|
| "The actual production of Musicassettes was done on machines
| running 32 times faster than normal playback. Cassette tape
| would be reeled over four heads recording what would be both
| sides at once at 60 IPS. The master tape that was source of
| the original music had been recorded at 7.5 IPS and this
| would also run 32 times faster, clocking up a playback speed
| of 240 IPS for duplication purposes."
|
| "This super-fast tape transport also required the circuitry
| to follow suit. So instead of the bias frequency being around
| 80kHz, it was now 2.4MHz; the amplifiers also needed to work
| over a frequency range of 200kHz to 500kHz."
|
| Commodore 64 with best tape Turbo is able to store slightly
| above 1MB per cassette. Japan already had floppy drives
| capable of storing over 1MB in 1983, but it looks like Etak
| needed more, with this 40 times faster tape drive delivering:
|
| "local map data base stored on a 3.5-MByte tape cassette."
|
| I would love to learn more details about this drive.
| Modulation used? Number of tracks? Format? Magnetic flux dump
| of one of the cassettes would be a lovely puzzle to decode.
| m463 wrote:
| I had a friend who had one of these in the mid-90's. It was
| pretty cool (at the time)
|
| I remember installation wasn't trivial. It needed a lot of
| futzing with the car. I remember the wheel rotation sensors, and
| they are briefly mentioned in the article.
|
| Smazing that nowadays all this stuff is solid state and in your
| pocket.
| stavros wrote:
| None of this stuff is solid state. What's solid state is
| completely different stuff, namely GPS. There's also a
| gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass, but I don't know if
| those can be considered solid state.
| fs111 wrote:
| When I started working at TeleAtlas Germany (former Robert Bosch
| Data; forever a part of TomTom now) in 2005 we still had
| production processes on the MapEngine technology coming from
| Etak. We had in-house python bindings that allowed for very
| productive development. It is fun to see this mentioned here
| today.
| ugur2nd wrote:
| I'm interested in this kind of thing. How things work and so on,
| the mechanisms and algorithms behind it. The article is long and
| I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I upvoted it to read it
| later. That way it's easy to access.
| ZFH wrote:
| How timely! I was watching a video about the ill fated Vector W8
| supercar last night, and wondered about that awesome CRT proto-
| GPS thing seen in some shots.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDBs15EYjs
| netsharc wrote:
| Terribly written article (there's no flow to the writing, the
| author seemed to have just listed bullet points off a
| PowerPoint notes section), and a blurry video with cringy
| narration. To complete it, here's an HD video tour of the
| Vector W8's screens: https://youtu.be/3WEhsS9ybwk?t=631 ,
| presented by a slightly annoying YouTuber.
| bsenftner wrote:
| My first job after undergrad ('88) was creating a Mac-like GUI
| for Etak for a vehicle tracking company in Los Angeles.
|
| GUIs were still new, DOS was still king, I had experience working
| on the Mac OS as a beta OS developer, and I'd been working in a
| 3D graphics research lab (yeah, 3D graphics was research back
| then), and this company named TeleTrak needed a real time
| updating map.
|
| So I made the GUI for their mapping application, using my
| knowledge from writing early Mac GUIs, 2D video games and early
| 3D graphics. Etak was literally Alienware, in it's data
| structures and extremely efficient processing. Where I'd been
| expecting significantly slower performance, I'd made a foundation
| expecting to use various tricks used to the game industry to make
| it appear like things were happening while loads occurred and so
| on. None of that was necessary, as Etak was the fastest aspect of
| the entire software bundle.
|
| A single 386 PC with a some type of memory expansion so each had
| an additional 1MB of RAM above the ordinary 640KB would run the
| software, and the software was capable of real time tracking
| above 30fps around 20 vehicles. If tracking a single vehicle, the
| mapping was fluid with at-the-time incredibly sexy real time
| 30fps rotations of the map as the vehicle turned corners.
|
| While working there, PacTel bought the company. Renamed PacTel
| TeleTrak, the company suddenly had tours from US and Israeli
| military brass, so I quit.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of
| memory and megabytes of storage?
|
| Your programming is constantly focused, not on the limitations
| this imposes, but on the opportunities opened up by this vast
| blank canvas like never before.
|
| Imagine what it would be like if programmers still got as much
| user-utility per user-kilobyte as they did when that's all they
| had.
|
| Back in 1982 with the mass-production of Ataris I thought it
| would be good to have a cartridge for each city which had the
| map data plus the visual landmarks. Like a 3-D driving
| simulator but using real maps. Which could be played as a
| racing game, I guess something like GTA. And with further
| development would provide a framework for on-board navigation
| using a battery-powered computer.
|
| Just one of the many things you never expect early-adopters
| with more resources to not already be doing.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I remember when I was hired, because of my past having made
| and sold video games (Vic-20 & C-64), TeleTrak make me sign a
| work agreement that included I would not try to write any
| games or goose eggs in their software.
|
| > Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes
| of memory and megabytes of storage?
|
| We've exceeded on multiple fronts what I thought I'd see in
| my lifetime. I can't imagine what people entering the field
| will see if they stay in the career. I started coding in '76,
| professionally in '82. My first deployment hardware had 3.5K,
| and today it's just ridiculous the resources on has, and
| exponentially so if one can still drop in assembly when
| needed. :)
| flir wrote:
| Reminds me a little of Sir Clive Sinclair's early products -
| someone who could see what gadgets the future wanted, but didn't
| _quite_ have the technology to create them (eg the portable
| "flat-screen" TV with the side-mounted electron gun).
| noemit wrote:
| Nolan told me he invented this so it would be easier for him to
| go sailing.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Wow, this is a fantastic story. It would make a good documentary!
| jhdias wrote:
| Also... 1981 https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2091030/
| barnabee wrote:
| Does anyone else wish they could configure modern sat nav apps to
| have a simplified map display/UI somewhat in that style?
| atemerev wrote:
| Vector displays are fascinating. I am trying to emulate the UI
| occasionally.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The tape search is really fascinating
| bambax wrote:
| Fascinating article.
|
| About this:
|
| > _Before GPS, navigation systems used a technique called 'dead
| reckoning'. Dead reckoning relied on sensors to determine
| distance traveled and direction of travel. However, no sensor is
| perfect. As a result the further you travel the greater the
| errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are._
|
| > _To solve this problem Etak invented 'augmented dead
| reckoning'. This used a process to match the position given by
| the navigation sensors to a topologically correct electronic map.
| Whenever the vehicle turned you made the assumption that you're
| driving on a road. At that point the location could be 'snapped'
| back to the road and the error from the sensors could be reset.
| This technique was later adopted by all navigation apps and is
| still in use today._
|
| Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by
| blocking the signal between the pilot and the drone; and it's
| also possible to jam GPS signal.
|
| But a drone that would use some version of "augmented dead
| reckoning" with a (relatively basic) analysis of features on the
| ground (roads, rivers, train tracks) would be able to guide
| itself without external input and would be virtually unstoppable
| (short of destruction).
|
| Yet they don't seem to exist yet? Is this harder to do than it
| sounds?
| jelkand wrote:
| That sounds like inertial navigation with nav fixes, which
| predates GPS. It certainly does exist.
| brk wrote:
| >Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by
| blocking the signal >between the pilot and the drone;
|
| Curious which country you are in where you see this occurring.
| defrost wrote:
| Singapore, Germany, the UK, USA, Australia, .. countries with
| airports that want domestic security, etc.
|
| https://www.trd.sg/
|
| https://hp-jammer.de/en/drohnenabwehr/
|
| etc.
|
| Once you start looking at GPS spoofing, etc. it gets quasi-
| military, non-commercial, requires credentiuals | LEO
| contacts, ways to work around checks and balances:
|
| https://www.regulus.com/ is Israeli miltech, other companies
| in other countries are similar.
| brk wrote:
| It's definitely not happening in the US. I've heard of it a
| bit in UAE, but not much elsewhere, so I was curious where
| the OP was observing this.
| defrost wrote:
| It's _definitely_ happening in the USofA with _federal_
| authorities acting on behalf of the FAA wrt airport
| security ...
|
| Sure, that's not commercial .. but it's a Federal LEO
| with a tan shirt and shorts and a truck with "UAS
| Mitigation Systems" in the back.
|
| https://www.faa.gov/airports/new_entrants/uas_detection_m
| iti... UAS mitigation or
| countermeasures include the capability to disrupt,
| disable, destroy, take control of, and/or provide
| alternate flight instructions to a UAS. Some
| UAS detection systems may have countermeasure
| capabilities built-in, which can be disabled, while
| others may offer them as an optional modular capability.
| FAA currently does not support the usage of C-UAS systems
| by any entity other than the federal departments
| (Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and Energy) that
| have explicit statutory authority to use this technology.
|
| It's kept on the relative down low but it's a similar
| situation in most G20 countries; quasi federal, quasi
| military, hard to get hold of w/out specific clearances,
| mostly only usable with explicit statutory authority ...
| but "leaky" in the same sense as "fake" mobile cell
| towers and other technical LEO gear has been in the past,
| out there with systems to hack cars, etc.
|
| Grey market availability.
| mikaraento wrote:
| GPS signal disturbancecs are surprisingly common:
| https://gpsjam.org/
| bambax wrote:
| I'm in France; here's a demo of a "drone gun" by law
| enforcement authorities (in French, but you can probably get
| the gist of it even without the dialogue):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKHNVJfVIQg&t=480s
|
| But I'm pretty sure this exists in most/all countries; DJI
| even sells equipment specially designed to listen to its own
| drones.
| flerchin wrote:
| Tomahawk missiles do this, as do many other munitions.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
| bitcurious wrote:
| > Yet they don't seem to exist yet? Is this harder to do than
| it sounds?
|
| It exists, but isn't advertised much as it's essentially a
| military technology. If you read about the homegrown attack
| drones Ukraine is building they use a variation of this tech.
| Various US platforms do something similar. You won't see this
| in a consumer drone anytime soon, but a skilled hobbyist could
| rig something together.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| About all somewhat advanced military systems do some kind of
| "augmented dead reckoning", including what you suggest.
|
| Civilian systems are usually not designed to work in a hostile
| environment, not only it is costly for a situation that is
| unlikely to happen in normal use, but authorities usually don't
| like it when such technology is available to the public. As a
| result, it tends to be classified. They want to be keep the
| advantage over enemies and criminals.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| Working on this. It is harder than it sounds, but not
| impossible.
| hasoleju wrote:
| Now I know why the cursor from the old asteroids game looks like
| the position indicator in my car navigation. Great fun fact!
|
| The Atari Team which created the game was located next to the
| company that built the first navigation device.
| gizmo wrote:
| One the one hand this is a cool story about real technology
| pioneers. On the other hand, this is a story about people
| building technology that was so ahead of its time that it had no
| chance of turning into a good product. Too expensive, too
| unreliable, too complicated.
|
| I think there are some obvious parallels here to General Magic
| and the Apple Newton. Very cool technology. Impressive demos. But
| ultimately the products didn't deliver on the vision. It wasn't
| until the iPod and capacitive touch screens and tiny hard drives
| came to the market that the iPhone became possible. Being 20
| years early doesn't help.
|
| Similar catastrophically flawed research projects get started
| today. In the past couple of days the Humane AI pin has been in
| the news. It's a wearable AI gadget that seems cool but it
| doesn't work. The tech has to catch up to the vision. It's at
| least a decade ahead of its time.
| amadeoeoeo wrote:
| Isn't this a necessary part on the innovation path?
| gizmo wrote:
| When smart people work on hard problems this usually comes
| with positive externalities. Even when the tech ends up
| worthless the the engineers will have learned a ton. I don't
| think that having people work on technology that is ahead of
| its time is bad for society. I think it's effectively high
| budget university research that presents itself as a
| commercial endeavor.
|
| How much does silicon valley invest into these doomed sci-fi
| projects annually? Many hundreds of millions at least. I
| suspect PhDs at a university could produce a lot more
| innovation at a fraction of the cost.
| mavhc wrote:
| Given that the tech and people went on to be involved in
| future nav systems, yes.
|
| I imagine all that work digitising the maps was used again
| and again for a few decades, and the people brought their
| hard won knowledge to newer systems
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why I think patents are important,
| because it allows them to profit from their inventions, and for
| the inventions to be reused later by others, even if the
| product was "too soon". They invented innovative technology,
| tried to build a real product, they should be able to make some
| money from others picking up the baton -- and presumably they
| did, when they sold the company through the chain of
| acquisitions that ended up with them at TomTom and with TomTom
| in control of their patent portfolio.
| gizmo wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more. If you try to build a commercial
| product and fail that doesn't entitle you to the profits made
| by others who made a successful product.
| flkiwi wrote:
| If the successful commercial product is based on the
| research of someone else, why does building a commercial
| product that succeeds entitle you to the innovations of
| others? I tend to favor liberalizing intellectual property,
| but your lens seems to suggest that value exists only in
| commercial success which ... is odd.
| jandrese wrote:
| I think the problem comes when the correct solution is so
| obvious that it can be seen years in advance and it
| becomes a race to see who can patent the obvious solution
| first before the tech catches up and people start
| actually building it.
|
| This is why people were mad at the "email, but on a cell
| phone!" patents and all of the "doing thing companies
| were already doing, but with internet!" patents from
| entities that don't make a product so they don't have to
| deal with real world limitations. Once the actual
| manufacturers start working on the problem they discover
| all of the obvious solutions locked behind patent walls.
| gizmo wrote:
| Patents also block people from coming up with the same
| design independently. In addition you've got patent
| trolls who will gladly shake you down but who have no
| desire to use their patents productively themselves.
| Patent law turns the simple mechanics of designing a good
| product into a mess that involves lawyers and other
| gatekeepers. This benefits incumbents and makes the
| market inaccessible for upstarts.
|
| I don't believe businesses deserve protection from
| competition. Not even when they've done meaningful
| original research. Society wins when people with the
| ability to bring a better product to market are legally
| allowed to do so.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I couldn't disagree with you more.
|
| Patents exist to reward research or invention that results
| in practicable ideas. Entrepreneurialism is not (and should
| not be) part of that.
| recursive wrote:
| I think this divide basically shows which part of making
| a product is harder? The R&D? Or the operational side of
| production and support?
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| In theory a reasonably skilled individual should be able
| to recreate your invention from the patent. In reality
| patents rarely provide sufficient details to do so. The
| fix is to bring reality back in line with theory.
| knodi123 wrote:
| So nobody should be an inventor unless they are employees
| of a corporation that can afford to commercialize
| everything they make?
|
| What does the patent even do- protect the rights of the
| most successful company? At what point does it get taken
| away from the company that couldn't make enough (what's
| the dollar threshold?) and to which company is it given
| (or do they all just use it at once, and then the most
| successful is awarded the patent, and the rest have to
| pay arbitrary licensing fees to the winner?)?
| immibis wrote:
| Only if someone builds it within 5 years.
| jrd259 wrote:
| The other issue is that it requires the driver to read a screen
| while driving. in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab I built a system
| called Back Seat Driver that provides _spoken_ driving
| directions, allowing the driver to keep their visual attention
| on the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0V6lDKQ0Y&t=21s.
| It ran on a Lisp Machine, _not_ in the vehicle. A later version
| ran on a Sun computer in the trunk.
|
| The in-car nav system was also augmented dead-reckoning, like
| Etak. GPS was still denied to civilians at the time.
| tmerr wrote:
| A more optimistic takeaway is that if you set out to solve a
| hard problem then you might be surprised about your tech's
| applications elsewhere. Between 1983 and 1989 they built a
| company that they went on to sell for ~25 million, or ~64
| million in 2024 dollars. I don't know how much went into it but
| it doesn't sound like an obvious failure.
|
| http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/60130710.html?did...
| cpr wrote:
| And, of course, the Asteroids Atari game sure looks like a
| version of the original Star Wars game on the PDP-1 from MIT I
| used to play in the Harvard grad computing center...
| flyinghamster wrote:
| There actually was a cabinet called "Space Wars" that was a
| coin-op implementation of Spacewar.
|
| https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/space-wars
| mempko wrote:
| Around the same time as Etak was Navteq. Navteq didn't build an
| in-car navigation system, but did build accurate map and the
| ability to provide turn by turn directions. Etak could not
| provide directions and just showed a map. Navteq had kiosks
| around SF where you could get a printed map with directions.
| Navteq eventually created the map used by all in-car navigation
| systems.
|
| It turns out great ideas happen around the same time. Computers
| became powerful enough that map digitization became possible. The
| confluence of technologies (all government funded, fyi) like
| computers, digital maps, and GPS, allows us to have a little
| square computer in our pockets that can tell us where we are in
| the world and how to get to where we want to go.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Wasn't there something from Honda with transparent film analog
| maps?
| jacobcoro wrote:
| Halt and catch fire vibes. Wonderful story
| Archelaos wrote:
| Here is a video worth watching about a similar project at Siemens
| in Munich from 1973, 12 years earlier (voice in German, English
| auto-translated subtitles available):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW6BcwCMumo
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > By today's standards it was also supremely difficult and
| tedious to find locations and even more difficult to work out how
| to get there.
|
| If by "today's standards" you mean "ask a computer and it just
| does it for you," then sure. But this is by no means difficult
| and involves the most minor tedium.
|
| Want to get from Nashville to Charleston? Grab a US atlas, hold
| your straight edge to connect the two cities. Find the highways
| that connect the two close to the straight line. Signage abounds
| along the way. If you know Charleston, SC is generally east and a
| bit south, you can likely follow signage mostly without the map.
| Maybe you need a Nashville-level street map to get to the
| highway, and maybe one for Charleston to find your hotel. But
| tedious? Not especially.
|
| Without signs, and needing to measure each leg? Or asking locals
| along the way? Now _that 's_ tedious.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Somewhat off topic. What do big military submarines use these
| days to navigate?
|
| Do they have nav systems based on topographic data of the sea
| floor? (I dont know if it is mapped to the degree its possible).
| Could that be read accurately with only passiv sensors? I think
| you could read it perfectly with sonar whatever that may have
| evolved into these days.
|
| I guess they could reach depth where they can poke an
| extraordinarily long antenna to the surface and talk to GPS
| systems? (I dont know if such an antenna exists but it would make
| sense)
| Razengan wrote:
| Cthulhu guides the navigators via dreams.
| ses1984 wrote:
| I guess they don't need to map the whole sea floor, just enough
| landmarks.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The more the better I would assume. I would guess some areas
| are boringly flat and easy, while other regions are full of
| obstacles and problems.
|
| I have read, but I cannot verify that the South China Sea is
| filled with obstacles and trouble, some they alleged China
| has created by sinking ships / crates / Supposedly to make it
| more difficult to navigate by submarine.
| wbl wrote:
| Inertial navigation complemented with occasional GPS fixes.
| Daub wrote:
| Time to plug my dear father's book 'The Principles of Arab
| Navigation'.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Arab-Navigation-2013-02-28...
| OJFord wrote:
| Quite incredible that so much of the innovation (perfectly
| recognisable and fundamentally still the same today) came in a
| single product.
|
| Alright fine 'six tapes to cover the San Francisco bay area' is
| not so recognisable, and pretty funny, but otherwise!
| jefurii wrote:
| I'd love to see a modern system that had all the niceties like
| GPS, music, bluetooth but with an evolved multi-function display
| (MFD) with keypad entry. Touchscreens in cars are a terrible
| idea.
| fudged71 wrote:
| This feels remarkably similar to the Humane Pin
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Completely ahead of its time. Navigation without GPS is
| unthinkable today...
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