Chicago Tribune, IL
01-22-07
Navteq's newest products provide sense of direction
By Jon Van
Whether you're walking or driving, the folks at Chicago-based Navteq Corp.
believe they can help you find your way.
Navteq, a pioneer in providing digital map data, this month unveiled a couple of
new products intended to help software application designers come up with new
navigational aids for consumers.
For motorists, a Navteq database has massive records of past highway speeds
tied to some 170,000 miles of primary and secondary roads in and around major
U.S. cities. Having access to traffic patterns should be helpful in designing
navigational tools for cars, said Howard Hayes, Navteq vice president for
dynamic content.
Historic data can be nearly as useful as responding to real-time traffic data,
Hayes said.
"For example, if you know over the past several years a particular segment of
road is typically slow between 9 and 10 am, you can begin to predict what might
happen tomorrow," Hayes said. "By knowing the pattern, you can suggest
alternate driving routes much more confidently."
Pedestrians with mobile phones, personal media players or personal navigation
devices may benefit from another new Navteq bundle of mapping information
that includes local points of interest. This information includes quality ratings from
Fodor's Travel.
"This product offers features specific to the needs of pedestrians," said George
Filley, Navteq vice president of product management.
He said that a traveler coming from a flight that landed at O'Hare International
Airport might use information displayed on a cell phone to find the nearest transit
option to take him to his hotel.
While riding a train or bus into the city, the traveler could look for restaurants,
museums and theaters located in the hotel's vicinity.
"This can work much the same way a travel guide would," Filley said. "It gives
you a local's perspective."
CLOSER TO INVISIBILITY: Last year Duke University engineers gained
attention by taking a first, tentative step toward creating an invisibility shield, and
now researchers at the Ames Laboratory in Iowa have taken another such step.
Both research teams work with metamaterials, also called left-handed materials,
that reflect electromagnetic radiation in unusual ways. These artificial materials
are designed to have a negative refractive index rather than the positive one
common to all naturally occurring materials.
The new materials bend light waves backward instead of forward, enabling
scientists to manipulate photons of light in a way comparable to how
semiconductors allow scientists to manipulate electrons.
The Duke work involved electromagnetic waves that aren't visible to humans but
which can be detected on radar.
The work at Ames, part of Iowa State University's Institute for Physical Research
and Technology, focuses on visible red light.
While such materials may one day be used to build an invisibility cloak like the
one popularized in fiction by Harry Potter, that application is many years in the
future.
Another application would be supersmall lenses with far higher resolution than
anything now available.
"Left-handed materials may one day lead to a type of flat superlens that operates
in the visible spectrum," said Costas Soukoulis, an Ames researcher, who
collaborated with colleagues in Germany to produce the new materials.
Such tiny superlenses might be used to provide high-resolution images from
inside the body for diagnosing and treating diseases at earlier stages.