News
- 09.01.2012 - Microsoft's Pedestrian Navigation Patent Dubbed 'Avoid Ghetto.' Really?
It's "pedestrian route production," not the "avoid ghetto" toggle, but various pundits have already miscategorized Microsoft's latest patent for a feature that would allow Windows Phones to create more user-friendly route navigation for those on foot.
So where does the "ghetto" part come into play? Presumably, right in the first line of Microsoft's description of patent No. 8,090,532: "As a pedestrian travels, various difficulties can be encountered, such as traveling through an unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures."
The fix, suggests Microsoft, is to combine an assessment of a user's behaviors with the user's upcoming tasks and some relevant external data sets. For example, Microsoft's mobile route-generation system could "learn" that a user leaves work at 5 p.m. each day and heads to a common location – home. Since the system's pedestrian-focused, it could design a route that a vehicle couldn't navigate to give the user the quickest possible walk home.
