Palo Alto (CA) - Nokia and UC Berkeley just finished a new research project that was able to provide real-time "direct from the street" traffic information using nothing but mobile phone GPS signals.

There are countless websites and subscription services that offer real-time traffic information based on accident reports and complicated calculations, but Nokia and UCB took that one step further by getting this data directly from traveling cars.

In the study, 100 students traveled a 10-mile stretch of highway along the California coastline.  Each car was equipped with a Nokia N95 phone with GPS capabilities.  The entire pool of GPS data was submitted to the university in real-time.

The point of the study was to see if this provided more accurate information than sources like traffic.com, which rely on weather conditions, accidents, and other external factors that are just plugged into a scale formula.

UC Berkeley said in a statement, "To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of this scale using GPS-enabled mobile devices to provide
traffic related data such as travel times, and with a deliberate focus on critical deployment factors like bandwidth costs and personal privacy
issues."

Nokia says it wants to take this small test of 100 people and branch it out to everyone who owns a GPS-enabled Nokia phone.  Users would have the option of sending their data anonymously to a central server that is able to collect and broadcast information from around the country.

logically you don'y even need GPS on phones. just t...

Feb 08, 2008 14:36     

logically you don'y even need GPS on phones. just trainglate each mobil phone and you can estimate each phone's location...and then you compare the location of each phone through time and you will see bunch of phones travelling like 70 miles per hour in on direction... Just that you need all the processing power to track each phone....
yo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

SMS "traffic on"

Feb 08, 2008 15:04     

and your phone/navigator/gps device will give you accurate, realtime trafic updates. display an target speed based on traffic conditions ahead (when approacing an traffic jam/accident - work in progress) as long as most drivers ahead of you keep the correct speed - you will too!
ikkeman report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Already been done...

Feb 09, 2008 10:01     

The Dash Express navigation system already did this. Each of their units is linked in real-time via the cellular network and reports anonymously back to home. The Dash unit finds 3 routes to your destination, and then factors in road conditions to estimate which one will be quickest. They use historical road data for that day (even holidays), it uses traffic reports of current road speed, and it collects data from every live active unit out there and looks at the REAL amount of time it's taking a car to get through that stretch of road.

Dozer42 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0