Have you heard about Google’s new innovative Visual Positioning System that gave a novel look to the present maps navigation technology? This mind blowing update in the navigation world is creating a wave in life style of people all around the world.

With this new technology, Google Maps can make use of the user’s phone camera to spot your surroundings and visually converse your direction right in front of your eyes.

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Are you living in heavily populated urban areas where there are lots of tall buildings? Do you often experience hassles of GPS drift and other similar problems while navigating? Then this new visual system is the right choice for you.

VPS-How It Works?

Leveraging the possibilities of GPS system and camera in the mobile phones and embedding the same with augmented reality Google is giving a new definition for navigation system. Let’s have a look on how it works!

VPS uses Google’s extensive back-end data and your device’s camera to analyze the surroundings where you are in. The greater accuracy of the features makes it really easy for them to identify where you are.   

• First of all, the button should be tapped to activate the visual view. Following, simply point your device’s camera to the preferred destination to see the relevant info.
• The surroundings will be displayed with an overlay of Maps data for close by business and there will be arrows pointed in the direction where you have to go.
• You can also see a small map displayed on the bottom side which acts as a reminder for where you are headed.
• VPS retrieves its data from the surrounding buildings and landmarks where you are in rather than completely relying on satellite location that erases the possible flaws with GPS.
• Google even has plans to put a character on the particular screen to give users a feel of an augmented reality tour guide. In the demo, they tried the navigation experience with a small fox.

Key Benefits of VPS

When the standard GPS technology is not enough, this new visual system can offer you ample support to fix your navigation concerns.

Out of the many benefits, here let us have a look at a few of the main advantages that makes it a stand out.

• Despite if it is for a large public venue, school or a business establishment, VPS can be a great aid to the visually-impaired. The close-up visual assistance can be a life changing assistance to the visually-impaired to make their navigation a lot easy.
• The camera-enabled navigation system can be a real friend in case you get lost in busy intersections or at an unfamiliar locale. Just switch on the phone’s camera and take the visual view and you are safe.
• VPS can help you to get better insights for your business, provide assistance for clients on foot and made available for all transportation methods.
• Being an icon in the navigation sector, Google is offering remarkable comfort and easiness for our travel from one spot to other with negligible dependency
• The demo even gave clear hints on the added benefits than just reaching the destination spot. By simply positioning the camera over the lanes where you are, you can actually automatically see your favourite spots like retailing outlets or eat outs.
• The system not just helps with routing directions but makes the best use of Augmented Reality so as to retrieve supplementary information by taking clues of nearby signboards and shops.
• The technology can really come handy in urban areas where GPS services are often distracted or blocked by skyscrapers.
• One of the key benefits is its usability in both indoor and outdoor areas, GPS-denied environments and the accuracy is assured despite if it is large or small areas.
• Moreover, the service is highly scalable and the low cost and high benefits make it special. You can enjoy the benefits with no beacon or anchor costs and lets you learn & map on the fly

How VPS Can Augment the World?

The possibilities of this advanced Visual Positioning System can in fact supplement the existing amazing location data models.

The outcome can be advancement in navigation, possibilities of marketing, and also robotics. Let us see how the use of VPS can augment the present world.

• Giving less emphasis to satellites, VPS can in fact provide a cloud-based depot of robust image data captured from physical surroundings. Ad-hoc visual markers can determine outdoor and indoor locations and the scanned geo-located photos let you identify distinctive features such as signage, buildings, and walls.
• Augmented marketing is on its way as major brands around the world can capitalize on this data to create compelling marketing content. Customers can be easily navigated to their goods of choice with an improved AR experience.
• In addition to augmented navigation, the possibilities of augmented robotics can in fact replace the expensive sensor workarounds.

How to Use VPS for Business?

When Visual Positioning System will get flourished worldwide, many sectors are going to get benefitted in some way or the other and business industry will be one major area. Let us see how.

• They can make use of the possibilities of the visual navigation system to help customers to be in their front doors without many hassles.
•  Filling out your Google business profile is the key as customers can see information about your business through Google’s Visual Positioning System service.
• You all know about how AR uses digital virtual presentations to help business enterprises to enhance physical real life scenarios. The Visual Positioning System technology allows businesses to take their customers to have a virtual visit to the store or product repository.

Expected Drawbacks

Just like every other innovations in technology, you cannot expect a cent percent perfect outcome as soon as it rolls out in the market.

Google will be looking out for user experiences and feedbacks to make relevant changes or updates to make it close to perfection. However, in the first case itself, you can expect a few drawbacks. Let us have a look. 

• Not to be a surprise, all indoor environment areas may not be appropriate for Visual Positioning System and there will be a lot of related issues to handle with at least in the first phase.
• Sufficient visual interest will be the key in most cases in order to work reliably, especially for re-localisation. False-positive detections can be avoided only with uniqueness of particular regions of the surroundings which can be challenging.
• Unlike the preloaded street view, the changing lighting conditions can result in occlusion in a visual view. This can happen when some areas get white out, or appear to be in dark shadows.
• In real world, there can be people or vehicles walking into your frame and blocking the accuracy of capturing location which is not in anybody’s hands. If it is a busy street, things can go worse. However, you can expect Google to take some extra measures to overcome it at least to some extent.

Conclusion

The exact time of availability of the technology in your hand phones is still to be announced. We are hoping that they will come with an update soon on that.

Moreover, by the time it gets rolled out into the world of technology, we can expect a few more additions or improvisations in the technology features making it more mind blowing.   

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We have moved to an era from where we used to ask the people on the way to check if the navigation is correct to checking on the phone using GPS to confirm the route.

The innovations are opening a new world of navigation where your device visually communicates the route. This is giving clear hints that we can expect much more on the years to come.