There are 904 airplanes in Chinese airspace right now. One plane just flew near my apartment as its journey from Chengdu to Shanghai nears the end. I know that because I’m playing around with a new plane tracking app – which includes some augmented reality trickery – that came out today, made by Chinese search engine giant Baidu.
The app, called Baidu Tianyan (tianyan could be translated as “eye in the sky”), will be familiar to anyone who uses FlightAware, the app that was in the news earlier this year as people sought to understand what on earth happened to the still missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. As with FlightAware, Baidu’s new app is accompanied by a browser-based flight tracker – see here – that does away with some of the slickness of the mobile app.
While the augmented reality aspect of the Baidu Tianyan mobile app is fun (pictured top), it’s actually the least useful part. It’s probably more useful and insightful when used to track flights on a map.:
You can also search by flight numbers to see if your flight is delayed. Or you could just marvel about how many sleek hunks of metal are screaming through the skies at the moment:
While it looks good and could prove useful, this only covers planes in or near Chinese airspaces, so this isn’t a global app yet.
Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s director of international communications, explains that the new app tracks flights by their ADS-B signal (that’s the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast system) and even tracks private aircraft. Here’s his brief demo video:
Baidu Tianyan is available for free for iOS.
See: Baidu’s research lab announces ‘Deep Speech’ recognition system
This post Baidu now has an eye in the sky with launch of new flight tracker app appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Baidu now has an eye in the sky with launch of new flight tracker app
No comments:
Post a Comment