gps/ phone tracking j2me mobile phone app

InBetweenIdeas

Hello all,

I am researching the possiblity of creating a mobile phone application that is 'location aware'.

That is it can use the location of the user as part of the experience. Eg if a user is in a city the phone can take in the users location and present the user with restaurants in the area.
Or a location based game.

Can anyone tell me what they know about GPS phones or can you use the triangulation type of method to locate the user.
Is this position data made available by Irish mobile network companies?

thanks
-jamie

A specific type of phone?

joc_06

First off you'll need your own hardware. this is not possible as a java app only imo

gps chips in phones use network assist to speed up calculating where they are. its called network assist. for cdma phones this is not so processor intensive as they have a good idea where they are already. gsm it takes more time for a cold start.

I spose you could use a cdma phone but youd need an unnatural knowledge of the innards to do anything with it.
is this for a school proj? really tough

InBetweenIdeas

thanks for the info.
By cdma u mean a '3g' phone?

It is for a college project, investigating if the idea is feasible.

Have considered the gps + phone idea though would need some way of getting the coordinates from the device passed into a j2me application(or flash lite though this is not supported on may mobile phones)

Could be expensive.

On the network provider side, have noticed on the business O2 site, they offer a service to allow a user to find the location of a mobile on a map. So possibility is out there. Though i would find it hard to believe the network company would give out mobile position free.

i have some java, c++ experience from college but if I need to go too deep into the innards of the phone it may not be workable given the time i have available.

Btw does anyone know of any Irish forums that deal with the area of location aware mobile applications?
Thanks

joc_06

I wouldnt say there are any. What you can do that'd be easy would be to buy a gps module and a microcontroller. Interface to both usually has a uart so you can get the data out of the gps module easy. Its in a format called NMEA. you could then use a mobile with IR and make a little circuit that throws out the NMEA data using SIRCs protocol or whatever IR they use in phones and then writ you're java applet to interpret that.
Actually itd be possible to cut out the micro and just use an ir led a 555 and a max232.
Are you a hardware or software engineer?

brryan

If its for a college/research project you could develop but not implement a bluetooth server which *could* be placed at various locations. Different games could be put on different servers. This idea was developed well by someone at my college last year where they developed a bluetooth aware application framework and one of the sample applications for it did just that.
The idea was for bloomsday, that somebody strolling around dublin could take part in not so much games , but different trivia depending where they were in the city.


Also have a look at this link, maybe read some of the papers on the website. They are tracking students locations all the time in some research project.

http://reality.media.mit.edu/user.php

1huge1

question

could this work on a nokia smartphone e.g 6600?

brryan

Yes. As far as i know it was actually tested on a 6600 but the bluetooth server not actually placed in a lampost or wherever. It sounds like you best bet. Whats the point on relying on some cell tower for location info when two people miles apart could recieve a signal from the same tower. Just do it yourself. You know where you put the server so if someone can discover it , they must be within 10 -100 metres

joc_06

it could if you were a genius with gps. if not then its possible but not for a college project me thinks. maybe a masters project.
gps on anything but an asic is very difficult and even then its very difficult.

jmcc

joc_06 wrote:

it could if you were a genius with gps. if not then its possible but not for a college project me thinks. maybe a masters project.
gps on anything but an asic is very difficult and even then its very difficult.

Even for a masters project this kind of thing is difficult. I looked at developing a location aware search engine in 2003 and had to develop a separate piece of electronics for it - with the idea that it would eventually be incorporated on a SIM. Not sure about GPS being in GSM phones though. It took a hell of a lot of messing with the GSM spec to get usable results.

Regards...jmcc

joc_06

jmcc wrote:

Not sure about GPS being in GSM phones though.

Gps is coming to phones in approx 6-8months. im working on it with a big player and theyre pushin it hard...

jmcc

joc_06 wrote:

Gps is coming to phones in approx 6-8months. im working on it with a big player and theyre pushin it hard...

Nice. I'll have to buy an new phone again. Actually now that I think about it, most of the dev work on this is easily upgradable. The key will be the amount of hackery required to get the data from the GPS in the phone to a higher level. I haven't looked at the GSM spec since 2003 but if the data can be extracted it should be easy enough to use it. The mobile phone location data from the Irish operators has been close to useless and GPS would make a nice change.

Regards...jmcc

msh

Hi ,

i saw a question on this page that goes back to 2004 but i thought answering it may be informative for those asking the same .

basically there two main types of tracking systems exist to date that are effectively working with reasonably good accuracy . first type uses a GPS receiver in combination with a telemetry system that is essentially used to transfer the GPS position readouts form the GPS receiver to a remote monitoring center . the second type uses the mobile phone network and a technique called triangulation to determine the location of a GSM device .

obviously for the first type a mobile phone with a GPS receiver can be used to calculate the location information and sending it back to a remote server . for this you need to run a software on the phone that reads the onboard GPS and send the location info to the monitoring center over GPRS or 3G. there are also few companies in Ireland that provide this service and have already developed software for mobile phones and a nice web based monitoring service like this one http://www.pinpoint247.com/personal-tracking.html.

for the second type that uses mobile phone network you have two options .first is to run a software on the phone that reads the signal strength of all surrounding cells and send it to a remote server. assuming that we already know the exact location of each cell the server program can calculate the exact location of the phone.

the second option is to use the GSM provider to calculate the location of the phone which is the same as first option in principle but the service provider will do all the calculations for you and provides a nice API to ping the phone. unfortunately this service is not currently available in Ireland . A good example can be found here http://orangepartner.com/site/enuk/develop/v_devcentre/network_interfaces/api/p_networkapis.jsp