I just want to thank you once again for being such a wonderful
benefactor for our research here at Georgia Tech. The latest
piece of equipment (the MP 2000) arrived on Friday. The Cyberguide
team is now ready to port the application over to the MessagePad.
They have already made significant progress in that regard and
we are able to render a public domain vector map from the US Census
Bureau. Most of that work was done by Jason Hong, who will soon
be in your neck of the woods, having accepted a graduate position at
Berkeley. Jason's work leveraged off the PC work done by another
gifted undergrad, Jeff Dempsey.
The prototype developed by the undergrads on the PC provides for
navigation tracking and picture taking. To get similar functionality
for the MessagePad, we wanted to make use of the PC card interfaces.
We have heard a rumor that we should be able to control something like
a QuickCam from the serial port (just rumor at this point), and
we were told by the Newton team that PC card cameras are not in the
plans. So to get positioning done, we would need to go through the
card slot. Mike Graves has been doing some research on our behalf
and the latest news is attached below. Can you provide any help in
getting a GPS card for us?
In other news, we have another effort in the Future Computing
Environments Group that is giving us relatively high precision indoor
positioning using a small LED beacon and infrared cameras. With our
current system, we are able to support 8 cameras, which should be
able to give us enough coverage for our new 3000 sq. foot lab. The
way the indoor system works, we are able to produce positioning information
out a TCP socket. We are building software modules for both the Newton
and PCs that will be able to connect to the positioning socket. The
next step will be to build a single software module that allows us
to dynamically switch between indoor and outdoor positioning services,
allowing for ubiquitous positioning. The only barrier to using the
MP 2000, then will be the availability of a wireless LAN card (looks
like we are ahead of the curve on that as well).
Again, thanks for your continued support of our efforts. We are
making great strides, and you are a good reason for that.
Gregory
P.S. I should be giving you all of the names for the students doing this
work. There are so many of them now, and I have tried to copy some
of them on this message.
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Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 14:38:37 -0700
To: abowd@cc.gatech.edu
From: Mike Graves <mgraves@apple.com>
Subject: Re: Trimble contact?
Gregory --
Here's what Eric has to say about Trimble and GPS cards. Jim knows Arthur
Woo and has worked with him a bit -- he may be able to help.
mg
>X-Sender: cooper3@pop.waonline.com
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 23:56:14 -0700
>To: Mike Graves <mgraves@apple.com>
>From: cooper@waonline.com (Eric Cooper)
>Subject: Re: Trimble contact?
>
>Good luck! I never had any luck with them, as you know. I asked
>Jim Spohrer to look into it (via Arthur Woo) several times, but
>nothing happened...
>Officially the project has been transferred to a group that only
>does OEM stuff, so it has been (essentially) killed. All prototypes
>were collected, supposedly. So there might be some units lying
>around.
>I guess that the answer is to contact Arthur Woo, but don't count
>on it being "profitable".
>
>-Eric
>
>>Eric --
>>Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech is trying to get hold of GPS cards. Is
>>there someone at Trimble he could contact (profitably, that is)?
>>Thanks.
>>
>>mg
>
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