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What3Words

Imagine being lost on the side of a mountain, or on a remote ski slope, and being able to tell rescuers your actual location in only three words. Or a system that could get mail to people in the favelas, or nomads on the Mongolian steppes, or places similar the Faroe Islands (long on sheep, brusk on maps and roads). British startup What3Words has an app for that. More than precisely, they have an algorithm — with a GUI draped on top of it for user convenience, and an API so that others can integrate with the system.

Here's how it works: They started past dividing the entire globe up into 57 trillion iii x 3m squares (ten′ on a side). And then they assign each square a fixed, permanent and unique 3-word accost, using a sanitized pool of 25-40,000 dictionary words, depending on which of its 9 currently supported languages the user prefers. Their algorithm converts each region of lat-long values into a value associated with a single 3-discussion string that really looks like the proper name of a niche IRC channel.

For example, the choice spot under the rain shelter at the metro station outside the science building at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam has an address: it's (somewhat fittingly) searched.final.ambient. The decommissioned fire tower at the top of Hurricane Mountain, in the Adirondacks of New York, is corrosive.sculpture.assumed. With What3Words' algorithm, it'south possible to address so specific a place. This means that you actually can get mail to the closet under the stairs. It's even possible to precisely address a place where the roads aren't named and the houses aren't numbered — or a identify in the wilderness, where there aren't roads or houses at all.

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The whole idea backside using words instead of lat-long is that it profoundly simplifies giving extremely specific locations. Lat-long coordinates are a mouthful, and they're really unpleasant if y'all have to give them over a crappy audio aqueduct. But combining extreme specificity with user-facing simplicity is the niche What3Words is seeking to fill.

Latitude and longitude are still meliorate when computers are talking to one another, but when you lot involve humans, it gets messy. "If y'all have an injury on the slopes," chief marketing officer Giles Rhys Jones told Magenta, "it'due south incredibly difficult to draw where y'all are. The problem with using GPS coordinates is that if I'k trying to shout 18 digits on a telephone while I'grand incredibly stressed, errors creep in." The complimentary What3Words app works without a data connection, and it's tiny — less than ten MB — then information technology's lightweight enough for basically whatsoever mobile phone.

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The organisation works well plenty for the Mongolian government to wager their postal arrangement on its quality. The World Banking concern estimates that a quarter of the Mongolian population lives a nomadic lifestyle. Many of them alive on the steppes, where in that location are no roads, no permanent structures, and certainly no numbers to tell a bewildered postal worker where to go. Only those people are still citizens who deserve representation, and especially the right to vote, which they tin can do past postal service. This algorithm lets everyone have an address, because every place on the planet tin can be concisely described. (Boreholes, skyscrapers and the Hive from Resident Evil excluded, for the curious; adding another give-and-take, though, for a string of four, could permit for this kind of vertical-axis specificity… devs, are yous listening?)

Santa clearly has a bespoke GPS app that uses an overlay based on the What3Words API, to enable present routing. For united states mere mortals, there's already a mapping app that speaks What3Words; it's called navmii.