Japan’s Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS

[yanpa]

Japan’s Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS
A $1.2 billion system of satellites and ground stations would give unprecedented accuracy

A stranger to Tokyo could easily get lost in its urban canyons. And GPS navigation, stymied by low resolution and a blocked view of the sky, might not be much help. But that won’t be the case after 2018. Engineers at Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Electric Corp. report that they’re on track to start up the first commercial, nationwide, centimeter-scale satellite positioning technology. As well as spot-on navigation, the technology will also usher in a variety of innovative new applications, its proponents say.

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... not sure how higher-resolution GPS would help if the sky is still blocked by those "urban canyons". I wonder if anyone's ever thought about mapping the location and strength of wifi signals and enabling devices to triangulate off that?

[Coligny]

You mean like Wifi geolocation ?
Or relay based ketai 'assisted' gps ?

[Russell]

In QZS-1 trial tests [...] the average accuracy is about 1.3 centimeters horizontally and 2.9 cm vertically.

This centimeter-scale precision promises to usher in a number of creative, or at least greatly improved, applications beyond car and personal navigation. Besides pointing out obvious uses like mapping and land surveying, Sam Pullen, a senior research engineer in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, says precision farming and autonomous tractor operations will be big applications.

Right.

Agriculture in Japan is already so advanced that this system will fit in perfectly...

I predict that the main applications will be pron (as in most of the interwabs).

Like building this in a Tenga and tracking your fapping movements...

[Coligny]

Dude, there's gyro and accelerometers for that...

Plus, it wouldn't work for dildos... like in any tunnels...