Monday, January 18, 2016

Find Any Location with Just Three Pictures


What3Words is the easiest way to share your location with friends and family. The What3Words location coding system divides the world into 57 trillion 3 x 3 meter squares. Each of those squares can be uniquely identified with just three words.

Enter any location in the world into What3Words and you will be given an easy to remember address consisting of just three words. You can then easily share your location with all your friends. For example, if I tell you I'm currently at 'Joke, Pretty, Dated', all you have to do is add those three words to the What3Words URL - map.what3words.com/joke.pretty.dated - and you can view a map of my location to within a few feet of accuracy.

However, as I have mentioned before, What3Words is limited to your literate friends. There's no use texting your location with just three words to your illiterate friends. They simply won't be able to read them.


What is needed then is a simple universal non-written location coding system. For example, the emoji. That's right What3Emojis is a revolutionary new way of addressing the entire world using the only common language of the entire human race, the emoji.

With What3Emojis the Earth is divided into 4m x 4m squares which are randomly assigned a unique three-emoji combination. If you want to share your location with someone else all you need to do is share the three emojis assigned to that location.

The creators of What3Emojis have made it their life's goal to teach the world how to speak Emoji. They imagine that this task will take between 25 to 50 years. Imagine, in just half a century's time, thanks to What3Emojis, we will all live in a world where no-one will ever get lost again.


However, if you can't wait half a century until the world's universal language is emoji, then you might want to give what3pictures a try. What3Pictures uses the what3words API in conjunction with the Google Image Search API to create a global location coding system that uses easy to recognize pictures.

The application works by taking the three words from an address provided by what3words and finding the most commonly searched images for each of those words in Google. Now, to share your location, all you have to do is cut & paste those images into a text or e-mail and then hope that your friends can guess the correct word for each of the images.

Unfortunately your illiterate friends still won't be able to type those words into what3words to view a map of your location. I guess they could always ask a literate friend to help them.

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