Okay, so these "sensors" come down to a lot of things. The compass, the accelerometer, the camera, the microphone, bluetooth, wifi. And the tech here is both about location as well as proximity. And actually, looking in my phone settings, it appears that Color uses GPS too. It's on in the location services part of settings on the iPhone.
I think the big takeaway is that it doesn't rely on it and it uses all of these signals to provide a far more accurate sense of location and accuracy. And I have to say, I'm not sure what about using more data points to get a more accurate reading would set off B.S. sensors.
I agree with you 100% on your definition of sensors, and I see that the app is about proximity as well as location.
What I'm curious about are how these "advanced proximity algorithms" and "sensor inaccuracies" can be used to locate co-users.
The only viable "sensor inaccuracy" example I can think of is network-based location. Mobile devices give lat/lon network location readings with error margins expressed as radii. Perhaps you could correlate users that are possibly close (e.g. users P and Q might be close, and are also experiencing a location error of X on the same cell carrier infrastructure, so let's strengthen their spatial relationship). Maybe it's another data point, but it's a pretty poor one.
Where this all falls down is with the notion that "GPS doesn't work" and implying that other non-positional sensors (e.g. accelerometers) can be used to get a location in the absence of GPS bearing.
Maybe I'm just missing an awesome, groundbreaking, (patented) aspect of their technology, or maybe there was some hyperbole involved in the article.
Anyways, sounds cool and I'll definitely try it if I get the chance.
Doesn't any app that uses the iPhone camera API to take photos need to have permission to access GPS data because the iPhone embeds GPS coordinates of where each photo was taken in the EXIF data. If it didn't it would be a back handed way of accessing a persons location w/o them realizing it.
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Okay, so these "sensors" come down to a lot of things. The compass, the accelerometer, the camera, the microphone, bluetooth, wifi. And the tech here is both about location as well as proximity. And actually, looking in my phone settings, it appears that Color uses GPS too. It's on in the location services part of settings on the iPhone.
I think the big takeaway is that it doesn't rely on it and it uses all of these signals to provide a far more accurate sense of location and accuracy. And I have to say, I'm not sure what about using more data points to get a more accurate reading would set off B.S. sensors.
I agree with you 100% on your definition of sensors, and I see that the app is about proximity as well as location.
What I'm curious about are how these "advanced proximity algorithms" and "sensor inaccuracies" can be used to locate co-users.
The only viable "sensor inaccuracy" example I can think of is network-based location. Mobile devices give lat/lon network location readings with error margins expressed as radii. Perhaps you could correlate users that are possibly close (e.g. users P and Q might be close, and are also experiencing a location error of X on the same cell carrier infrastructure, so let's strengthen their spatial relationship). Maybe it's another data point, but it's a pretty poor one.
Where this all falls down is with the notion that "GPS doesn't work" and implying that other non-positional sensors (e.g. accelerometers) can be used to get a location in the absence of GPS bearing.
Maybe I'm just missing an awesome, groundbreaking, (patented) aspect of their technology, or maybe there was some hyperbole involved in the article.
Anyways, sounds cool and I'll definitely try it if I get the chance.
Doesn't any app that uses the iPhone camera API to take photos need to have permission to access GPS data because the iPhone embeds GPS coordinates of where each photo was taken in the EXIF data. If it didn't it would be a back handed way of accessing a persons location w/o them realizing it.
If you turn off the location service for Color app, the app itself will explicitly tell you that it can't work without the service.