Video shows the road ahead
"Hundred Cars" is a mixture of vision and hard work that shows the dynamic of the day when Nokia research took to the street.
In an experiment along California's I-880 on February 8th, Nokia Research delivered technology that showed how GPS-enabled multimedia computers can accurately predict traffic in real-time. A video has now been created to celebrate what was a milestone not only in traffic research, but also in Nokia's efforts to create more open innovation through collaborative projects and initiatives - in this case with UC Berkeley and California Department of Transportation.
Quinn Jacobson's NRC Palo Alto team arranged for 100 drivers to enter the traffic along a 10 mile section of California's highway system - equipped with GPS-enabled Nokia N95's. 100 cars matches what Nokia sees as the equivalent of 5% of drivers in the US who will have cellphones with GPS capability in the near future. This is the percentage that Quinn's team believes can provide an accurate real-time view of traffic conditions.
What this implies is that a small percentage of GPS-enabled phones can serve to expand coverage to thousands of miles of highways and urban arterials where traditional sensors are not even considered an option" - dramatically cutting costs and offering drivers new ways to benefit from services that bring aggregated data into personally-relevant services.
But just as importantly, NRC research is hinting at a new direction of innovation related to data privacy - providing personally-relevant services to individuals without compromising sensitive personal data.
In the Mobile Century event, devices stored speed and position information every 3 seconds and simlutaneously sent this information wirelessly to a server for real-time processing. The results were witnessed in real-time. Large screens at "command central" showed the cellphone-processed data compared with on-site camera images of real-time traffic conditions.
This comparison clearly showed that the cellphone-enabled GPS information realistically matched the real-time traffic conditions. And to many people's surprise, the information was actually faster than a commonly used sensor-based system used on the internet site traffic.com.
The results also provide new insights into how cellphone-enabled GPS data processing has the potential to cut costs of traffic monitoring and expand coverage to thousands of miles of highways and urban arterials where traditional sensors are not even considered an option.
Watch the video to get more insight into the day, the research, and the implications for being able to accurately track and, more importantly, predict, traffic problems, on any road in the world.
