Grabbing a ride in Nokia’s mapping car - covarrubiasdond1949

If you'Re like me, you're healed used to navigating the world with a GPS mapping app happening your smartphone. But have you ever given a thought to the work that goes into acquiring all that information into the map? It's a pile to a higher degree just photographing street scenes, as I establish out of late when I took a ride in a Nokia correspondence car.

Nokia's mapping car gets ready to hit the road.

The nigh marked feature of the car, beyond its bright blue color and the distinctive "Hera" logotype along the door, is the apparatus on the roof.

"On top we have really high-precision cameras and panoramic cameras," aforesaid Drop-off Fox, senior vice chairman of location subject matter at Nokia.

A scanning apparatus sits on the roof of Nokia's mapping car. (Click to expatiate)

Fox pointed to two sets of cameras. A lower set that gathers images of road signs, shop names, address plates and other information that can be old to identify and supplement correspondenc data, and an upper located that captures panoramic images of the car's surroundings.

"The truly unique sensor is the one that's rotating raised Hera," helium said, pointing to a silver cylindrical object in 'tween the upper berth and lower cameras that was spinning at a fast pace. "This is a laser sensor. There are 64 lasers in this. It's actually assembling 1.3 million points of data all second and this is what allows USA to capture the world in 3D."

The optical maser bounces soured every reflective object around the car, including buildings, pedestrians, signs, trees and even road markings. IT helps to produce an incredibly detailed three-magnitude correspondenc of the surroundings.

A blind inside the Nokia mapping auto shows the output of the laser sensor.

There's a blind inside the car that provides a better deal what that laser scanner is capturing. A mass of lines, each representing the beam route the laser is taking, flash and pulse make it ambitious to immediately see on the button what the laser is capturing. But after a couple of seconds of staring at information technology, me eyes sized out the throw together of lines, and the buildings, cars and mass overtaking by were easy to realise out.

To keep its maps up-to-date and expand the service, these cars are on the road almost every day. The matchless I'm riding in spends just about of its time in Golden State, painful up tens of thousands of miles each year. The driver is guided by a custom smartphone app that shows roadstead cosmopolitan and those not.

"Maintaining the map is much harder than building it the first time," same Fox. "We have to preserve these maps forever and we need to understand what's changed. So we stimulate over 80,000 sources of information that we use to serve us identify change in the real world. Then once we understand where change is occurring, we'll send cars outgoing to collect the real information."

Roughly of that information comes as anonymous data from users.

"We actually get 13 billion points of information every month from people who are driving the roads, and because we can meet where people are driving, we can see where there are changes in the road network."

The outcome is the fertile salmagundi of info that makes up the mapping services available from your cellphone.

Nokia's mapping car drives through San Francisco.

Nokia has just opened up its correspondence political platform to non-Nokia smartphones. Its mapping data is shared throughout Windows Phone 8 handsets and the company hopes to attract Apple users with an app for its Here.com service. Nokia is too making the platform available to other phone makers under a license.