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Old 12-31-2015, 09:17 AM   #2
Johnoly
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Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Orlando
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Re: What navigation technology is still needed?

Quote:
Originally Posted by diveBabe View Post
....What technologies do you think they'll come out with next? What features and capabilities do you think are still needed?
I need to qualify the below by saying the population of 'drift diving' scuba divers is an extremely small market share and next to impossible to bring to market a new product and have it make a substantial profit.

With that said, I think the next big explosion for drift divers will be what "@trip" and reef.org are currently doing and building. The concept that they are using is to tie a GPS recording unit (any handheld) to a surface buoy so it can record a normal GPS signal and log the track. The diver then holds an underwater still camera and takes many multiple pictures of items they want to track underwater. The camera has a timestamp on each photo taken. The GPS also records a timestamp at short intervals. @trip syncs these 2 timestamps together and produces an accurate map of where the diver went drifting and recorded. This information is very valuable to divers seeking patterns of where to find certain fish, coral & plant life, and sand shifts.

Since this could now be downloaded into a database format and viewed on a GIS system with specific query's, you could easily have a simple graphical map that will give you a high percentage possibility of finding what you are looking for (given a large enough dataset).

Since you work for Navionics, it would be up to the marketing managers there to determine the cost and market potential to see if they could sell a profitable program that would bring everything together in a nice simple package of data collection, logging, GIS and a waterproof device for all of it. Right now, we have to do everything manually in steps and you need to be pretty good at photos, databases, GIS & programming. But the output is pretty mind blowing on the patterns that it is producing. As the dataset gets bigger, the ability to locate things that move around is going to dramatically increase. Reef.org and give you practical examples to show you how this works.
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