By: David Murphy
Source: http://www.pcmag.com
Category: Patent News
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| Microsoft Patent |
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.
"In addition, unexpected results can take place through practice of the disclosed innovation," reads Microsoft's patent. "As an illustration, a pedestrian could arrive at a location faster than if she traveled in a vehicle by taking more direct paths, yet a vehicle commonly travels much faster. Due to detailed route planning, a direction set can be created that allows a user to take more diverse paths that can compensate for a general lack of speed."
But that's not all. The system could also take a user's history into account ("paths previously taken by a user, available paths, user experiences upon the paths, etc.") as well as any potential stops that might otherwise alter a user's normal route on a given day – like a calendar appointment that would force a user to stop somewhere after work on the way home, for example.
As for the "avoid ghetto" bit, Microsoft also indicates that its pedestrian route navigation system could take database information into account when planning one's walking route, which could include weather information, crime statistics, and demographic information. But the specific crime statistics or demographics that Microsoft's system might consider, and what the threshold might be that would deem a route "unsafe" by the system, wasn't specified.
The crux of Microsoft's patent is that it wants to build a real-time navigational system that gives users the best possible walk home, using a combination of a walker's preferences, third-party data, and the specific choices a person makes during the walk itself (like the benefits of switching to public transit mid-way, for example). The "avoid ghetto" tag is a bit of a misnomer; Microsoft seems to want its users to be able to avoid any and all transit headaches.
Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398562,00.asp
