what3words - rigid.inflatable.boat - Louisville

[Gobuchul]

I'm not impressed by the app, think it's rather pointless.

However, rigid.inflatable.boat puts you near Louisville, USA.

Any members from that part of the World?

[Wightdiver]

Originally Posted by Gobuchul

I'm not impressed by the app, think it's rather pointless.

However, rigid.inflatable.boat puts you near Louisville, USA.

Any members from that part of the World?

I downloaded it yesterday and cannot really understand how to use it?

There must be a teckie out there who can help?

[Obsidian]

The emergency services are going nuts for it, obviously no replacement for good navigation on land or sea, but its helping with the frustration of people having no idea where they are when they need help.

Concept is that the entire globe has been been divided into 3m squares, each one has a three word address. Its like Lat/Long but for people who watch Love Island.

[Pikey Dave]

Originally Posted by Obsidian

......... Its like Lat/Long but for people who watch Love Island.

[emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]

[ShinyShoe]

Originally Posted by Wightdiver

I downloaded it yesterday and cannot really understand how to use it?

There must be a teckie out there who can help?

What's the problem?

[willk]

Originally Posted by ShinyShoe

What's the problem?

Clearly, he's not wearing a hoodie.

I read a thing yesterday about some people who were rescued from a council "forest" in the UK having deployed W3W. They were on paths and roads but were hopelessly lost and down to their last can of Lilt.....

[Poly]

Originally Posted by Gobuchul

I'm not impressed by the app, think it's rather pointless.

From a marine point of view, especially with DSC it mostly is.

Kids use it when off biking - if they have a mechanical or a crash and need my help they can send me a position by text (as inevitably they’ve used all their data) really easily. They could just extract a position from google maps or some other app, paste it in and send to me then I’d need to copy it into a suitable app at my end. All hoping we don’t make any cut n paste errors - or have to retype something and jumble two digits, or miscommunication DMS.d gps cords into D.ddd.

I’ve actually used it to tell my wife where I was parked waiting for her. There are probably dozens of other tools I could have used - but would she have found it as easy to understand? That has nothing to do with the three words thing - it’s just been designed nicely and works without having data.

[willk]

Originally Posted by Poly

I’ve actually used it to tell my wife where I was parked waiting for her.

Round, The, Corner?

[Wightdiver]

Originally Posted by ShinyShoe

What's the problem?

What do I do with it?

[Poly]

Originally Posted by Wightdiver

What do I do with it?

Ok, you’ve installed the app?

When you open it - it will show your location as three words. The PR this week is If you were on the phone to an emergency service who use the app you can just tell them those three words and they will know exactly where you are.

If you want to tell someone else where you are then tap “share” (this is on iPhone as far as I remember it’s similar on Android). You’ll get options but in my opinion the most useful is sms (ie text message). It sends a link which will open in the app if the recipient has it installed or in a web browser if they don’t and will show a map/direction.

[Poly]

Originally Posted by willk

Round, The, Corner?

Got.bored.waiting

[ShinyShoe]

Originally Posted by Wightdiver

What do I do with it?

You install the app. Sounds like you have. As long as you enabled location for it (on 'droid you'd be asked when you install it / open it first time). It uses your GPS like any other navigation type application.

It will show where you are on a map. It will list three words something like

daring.lion.race https://what3words.com/daring.lion.race which is actually just outside Charing Cross Train Station

You tell those three words to someone else who wants to locate you, just like sending them a Long Lat or OS Grid Ref. They locate you to about 3m square anywhere in the world. That simple.

You could for instance teach a four year old a three word phrase for your home location. POSSIBLY easier than house number, street name, town.

Using that daring.loin.race example - in 3 words you have precisely identified where you are. You might say you could do that with "Outside Charing Cross Station" - 4 words - but easier to understand, no app, no confusion...?

Except - there is Charing Cross Underground and Charing Cross Mainline in London, and Charing Cross Low Level in Glasgow that i know of. Its Charing Cross Mainline in London. But I'll guess there are several exits.

You could use a Long Lat (or a OS Grid Ref). You can certainly send a Long Lat formatted in a URL and it open straight to Google Maps to do as Poly describes with a text message. Great on a smart phone.

If you are on the phone to the emergency services you could give a Google + Code: "GV5G+73 London" - but we know people struggle with letters and even with GEE VEE FIVE GEE PLUS SEVENTY THREE LONDON - thats 8 'words' which can be miss heard. Your average punter will make up a commoner version of NATO Phonetics that would work the letters, but they will not say SEVEN THREE they will say seventy three which could be heard as 17 3 (no idea if thats a valid number).

Or you can give the Long Lat:
51°30'30.2"N 0°07'31.0"W
51.508397, -0.125288

Did you want that in decimal?

FIFTY ONE POINT FIVE ZERO EIGHT THREE NINE SEVEN
MINUS (bet that gets missed a lot) ZERO POINT ONE TWO FIVE TWO EIGHT EIGHT

So Eighteen words - easily mis-heard - if heard wrong can get a plausible location a couple of miles out.

Do degrees and minutes - no hope of a common punter giving the co-ords with degrees minutes seconds correctly! If someone says 51 degrees 30, 30 point 2 N - did they just repeat the thirty i.e. say 51°30.2N or say 51°30'30.2

We've all heard the CG ask for a Long Lat from a DSC distress call. Its painfully slow.

Its been designed to avoid confusing words as far as possible.

I can see uses for calling the other half to know which exit of a building to pick her up at or something.

As Willk says - some youfs round my way got lost in a forest (it was on a ridiculously raining night last week - you have to question why they were out in their hoodies in the woods in the dark!) - The local cops and MRT used it to locate them. I'm sure they would have managed another way, but seems easy enough... and safely extracted.

From an emergency services perspective I suspect they've been slow taking advantage of tech. Although I heard recently of a teenager who was asked to install an app on their phone at the scene of a serious RTC so that the air ambulance could be streamed pictures of what they were going to while en-route...

https://what3words.com/soft.inflatable.boat ?

[Nos4r2]

A bit of a coincidence but I've just had this response from Gloucestershire police as I tried to use it to show the location of a crime scene back in May and they didn't use it then:-


"Thank you for your email. I forwarded it to Supt ********** who oversees our Force Control Room who confirmed that we are currently implementing this into our Incident recording Database (STORM) so hopefully, in time we will be effective in using it like the other 35 emergency services do nationally.

Thank you once again for your email."

I think the big plus of it is that there's only one format and it's easy to remember and understand.
You don't have to be online as long as you have the app either, you can pick up the location from the app just using your phone GPS. (just tried that one, and it's true)

Kind regards

[willk]

Originally Posted by ShinyShoe

It will list three words something like

daring.lion.race https://what3words.com/daring.lion.race which is actually just outside Charing Cross Train Station........

................Using that daring.loin.race example - in 3 words you have precisely identified where you are.

Shiney, you've accidentally hit on the thing that worried me - get one of those words wrong, mispronounce it or miss hear it or miss type it and your loin's race is run, so to speak.

I was being facetious earlier - the system has obvious application to a wide audience but comes (IMHO) with it's very own specific set of problems. One could list them all day but ultimately it boils down to it being a very accurate geolocation system that almost any f-wit with a smartphone can use.

Some off the cuff concerns:

The Sun has a 600 word vocabulary - for a reason
W3W is English speaking
10% of the population are Dyslexic
Quite a scary number of people can't read
Lion or Loin - transcription errors will still occur
Telephony issues - words will sound similar - spelling them won't always help.

[Poly]

Originally Posted by willk

:

The Sun has a 600 word vocabulary - for a reason
W3W is English speaking
10% of the population are Dyslexic
Quite a scary number of people can't read
Lion or Loin - transcription errors will still occur
Telephony issues - words will sound similar - spelling them won't always help.

Actually W3W is multilingual but isn’t simply a translation. I’ve not tested to see what happens if you send French words to the English version of the system.

Lion v loin - are you in Catalonia or London?

It’s far from a perfect panacea but it would certainly be easier if the owner of this holiday cottage had provided their words than a postcode that Garmin, google, and Apple maps all think is somewhere different (and none of them are here)

[Obsidian]

From Jersey Coastguard's Facebook...

"One of the biggest challenges we face whilst incident working is determining exactly where a casualty is. More often than not, the casualty vessel is able to give us their Latitude & Longitude position supplied by their on board GPS unit, however in the heat of the moment, this numerical position can be difficult to relay to us as was the case two nights ago, when a casualty passed a Lat & Long that showed them to be 20 miles north of Alderney instead of 8 miles west of Dielette

"But not all vessels or personal water craft have or are required to carry a GPS unit for example, kayakers, SUPs, small sailing/motor vessels who rely on visual references to determine their location.

"You can of course find your location on a mobile phone using the inbuilt GPS or Compass function, but we have been testing a new app called What3words which you may find really useful."

[ShinyShoe]

The Sun has a 600 word vocabulary - for a reason
Darwin? :-p
One shouldn't judge hoody wearing teenagers who are in the dark wet Forrest on a night, but it sounded like they did manage to read the words: kicked', 'converged' and 'soccer' at a guess, converged is not in the sun's dictionary
W3W is English speaking
several languages available - English covers the whole world some don't. But I accept if a Arabic speaker is on the phone they may struggle to say the English words and if there was an Arabic version that may not help the English speaking call handler. But if they speak no English... The call handler is screwed anyway!
10% of the population are Dyslexic
indeed. But, is it anymore prone to problems than a Long Lat. People seem to mix numbers up easily. Harder to spot?
Quite a scary number of people can't read
is this any worse for them than anything else? If it's their fixed location - they can learn 3 words rather than a 16 digit number.
Lion or Loin - transcription errors will still occur
they will. I'm surprised both exist in the dictionary, but it's been designed so that where errors like that may occur you get geographically odd locations. If I'm on the phone to London ambulance saying I'm at the entrance to Charing cross station and my position is .loin. they can quickly ask for more info because that shows as Spain! With a numerical system I could be saying I'm at caring cross, give a number wrong and move myself 200metres -close enough that my general location is right but the detail is wrong, for a routine emergency in London, adds delay but probably they find me. For a terrorist incident they may confuse me with the other casualty 200m away.
Telephony issues - words will sound similar - spelling them won't always help.
they've used some algorithm to try and reduce the risk

It's not perfect. The emergency services are excited by it which makes me think nothing they have normally used till now is perfect. Hopefully this is better.
Do I expect my next DSC radio to list my lat long in words - no. Have I installed the app - yes

[John Kennett]

Originally Posted by Obsidian

The emergency services are going nuts for it

I know that some are trialling it, but I think that’s probably mostly due to determined marketing from the company behind it. It seems to be very much a profit orientated product. Not saying it’s necessarily bad, but I’m not entirely convinced by it either.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why...t-three-words/

[Obsidian]

Very interesting reading John, like a narcotics dealer they are getting people hooked on something they will soon not be able to live without.

[Wightdiver]

Polly/ShineyShoe

Thanks for your detailed responses, I will explore the app in more details as I am sure it will be useful.

Do you think I would get on better if I wore a hoodie, or a baseball cap backwards?

Andy