Pedestrian Dead Reckoning

Pedestrian dead reckoning or PDR, is a form of dead reckoning in which the position of a person in the interior of a building or on a walkway is determined by calculating their previous position, plus adding their speed – either known or estimated – to that position. It is extremely handy as a method to overcome transmission propagation latency. In other words, to work out where someone is, without necessarily waiting for a signal from them to verify position.

PDR works when the pedestrian has on their person a device capable of connecting to the internet or an intranet, which contains a sensor capable of showing their orientation and velocity. Normally, a modern smart phone suffices. Using even intermittent contact, their position can be extrapolated at any given moment.

PDR is encountered more and more frequently as a security measure and a means to track the dispersion of personnel in a given area, for logistics purposes. Like with all dead reckoning techniques, it is not really suitable for monitoring fine movement such as with a VR interface. As time passes since the last actual position update, the PDR estimate of the person's actual location becomes less and less accurate. It also cannot deal with direction changes, as it extrapolates only from the last known data. For this reason, it is recommended only for filling in gaps between actual positioning data packets no more than a few seconds apart.

See Also: Dead Reckoning, Gyroscope, Body Area Network

Below, we offer a selection of links from our resource databases which may match this term.

PDR Pedestrian Dead Reckoning

Results by page [1]   

Information Theoretic Death
In the purely physical world, death is a straightforward thing: You are either alive, or you are not. When you add in the purely virtual, heavily interconnected worlds of cyberspace, that model changes drastically. When do you deem someone to be irredeemably dead, if part of their mind is active and self-modifying online?

Aztec Templo Mayor: A VR World in a Book
It's a novel concept, creating an elaborate VR world with painstaking detail then primarily only giving access to it through the pages of a dead-tree printed book. However, that is just what Antonio Serrato-Combe, professor of architecture at the University of Utah, did.

Online Games & The Law, Part Five: Property Rights
An interesting article, concerning the "right of publicity" laws in the USA, where you're not allowed to use someone's name or likeness to sell your product. This is a problem if you use a celebrity - even dead, in-world. The article also looks at and explores the developing issue of Virtual Property Rights, and your legal standpoint as a developer.

Large Image Display: AWGate 5.0: Self-Assembing Logos
This is the entrance world for ActiveWorlds, which every newcomer to the various worlds sees when they come in. It is thus in their interest to make it as flashy and awe-inspiring as possible. Those trees are all around the outside of this small world, and if you look at them and then conclude that they are nothing more than an irregularly shaped rock retextured with a leaf pattern, masked, and then dropped on top of a bark textured flagpole, you would be dead on the money. That is precisely what those are.

Resource List: The Lively Debacle
Google lively was launched in mid 2008 as a ?Second Life Killer? quothe the company. It launched with a great deal of fanfare, and press releases out the wazoo. Google desired everyone to come see their second foray into VR (first being Google Earth). Needless to say, things did not go exactly as planned, with the world being an embarrassing mistake Google would rather forget, and dead before the end of the year.

Thirteenth Floor: World Building
What was nice about the world-building method used in floor 13, was it did not cut off suddenly, like many if not most worldlets in modern times do. Usually you have a grid, of a set number of cells arranged into a square or rectangular shape. Up until the edge of that grid, everything seems normal, then suddenly all the trees, rocks, vegetation, man-made objects stop dead.

Shrek 2

Shrek 2 takes off right from where Shrek ended. Shrek and Fiona are now married, and our first images are the camcorder-style glimpses of their honeymoon, the two of them larking about in total married bliss, having a wonderful, romantic time. Unfortunately, the honeymoon is over, the two of them return to the foreboding image of married life as the film opens, with Donkey having house-sat for them, and done absolutely nothing save make himself at home. If the piles of unopened letters, dust-covered furniture, and dead plants were not enough, a messenger arrives at the door, to proclaim that the King and Queen of Far Far Away ? Fiona?s parents ? would like to meet Shrek...

Results by page