Swede packs off GPS to make world's biggest sketch Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar claims to have created the world's biggest "drawing", having dispatched a GPS unit on a 110,664 km odyssey to create a global self portrait: The world's biggest drawing superimposed on map Nordenankar explains: "On the 17th of March 2008, I sent away a briefcase containing a GPS device with …
"The best advertising is developed with society. using a GPs and the express shipping company DhL, i drew a self-portrait on our planet. i used the technological aids of our time to make the world’s biggest drawing, along with advertising adapted to the contemporary era. a campaign the recipient wants to see and which is interesting enough for people to want to share it with their friends."
I for one condemn the use of general practioners from the medical field to be utilised to help make pointless artistic expressions when they could be thinking of the children etc.
I also don't believe that anyone who can't capitalise the terms and companies they are using to publicise themselves could come up with the intellectual nouse to come up with such a grandiose plan.
Nor should they be allowed publicity.
Or air for that matter.
Steven R
[feeling a bit ill and grumpy today]
What an amazing piece of kit that GPS is. Goodness knows how big the battery was, but it's a tad larger than the normal batteries that last for 16 hours.
And the aerial must be pretty damn special to look through the metal body of an airplane. Most GPS' I've used struggle to look through a bit of plastic of a roof.
Then there's the instructions to follow a 6000 km looping course around Europe to places where there's no places, let alone destinations for landing a cargo plane.
Oh, and the GPS must have had an amazing memory; normally the tracking log fills up after a few days.
Amazing really.
How did they get this through customs, it looks like a movie prop bomb.
They should have gone the eco way and attatched a gps with solar panels to that giant floating island formed out of plastic and other waste that moves around the ocean.
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-Plastic4nov02.htm
Then said DHL are using biofuel or providing recycled packaging to customers. Even though biofuel doesn't make sense yet.
The reason the briefcase was so big is that it must have contained a lead-acid car battery in there.And it looks like an aluminium briefcase. An effective Faraday cage if ever I saw one.
P.S. GPS gets confused on Eurostar trains as well. It doesn't expect cars to be driving at 186 mph
I'm certain that there's something in the back of my mind somewhere about different map projections not being accurate (Mercator, Miller, etc) so how on earth (no pun intended) was he able to plot the co-ordinates required to 'draw' this image? He and DHL are obviously very clever *he says, with his tongue in his cheek*. I'm declining to definately decide if I think this is fake or not, though I'm leaning toward a blend of a real GPS track and artistic license.
Of course, it's been done before; http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery.htm
'I'll get my coat' because I have a magical GPS in the poachers pocket which sees through all current building and plane making materials, and some that haven't been invented yet.
For those doubting about the technology, surely it's not that difficult? Battery lifetime: given the resolution required surely it only needs to turn itself on and get a fix every 10 minutes or so. And if you're only logging that often I'm sure a 64+GB SSD would have plenty of room. Finally the briefcase could have a whole load of interleaved aerials and a socket on the outside to attach a larger one...or the instructions to the DHL drivers could have been to always carry it on the front seat. Works for my N95...as for being inside buildings, it only needs to catch some signal going in and going out and then assume it's still at the last known position till it gets another fix or some algorithm like that.
This of course assumes he used heavily customised kit and not an off-the-shelf product. I probably made several wrong assumptions above but it doesn't seem like it should be impossible. I'm pretty sure this bloke could do it pretty easily http://spritesmods.com/?art=main
Still at the end of the day the only way he could possibly have gotten those lovely patterns over the ocean is chartering his own planes at ridiculous cost.
Given that the firm I work for has sold GPS trackers that operate for months from batteries for asset location purposes, if it's in a suitcase full of batteries and with an external aerial feed (i.e. on the roof of the truck, or a window of a plane) then it's possible. Given the scales involved even if the signal is weak and the position is out by a couple of kilometers it'd still work.
That said, I prefer the conspiracy theories ;-)
http://animasher.s3.amazonaws.com/nordenankar/travel%20instructions.pdf
Looks like the route DHL normally take to deliver stuff here...
The journey from just south of Iceland to just off the African coast looks a bit convoluted, I hope they weren't diverting other important packages for a publicity stunt.
The Reg is a Fake! We, and all of the stories here, are figments of the neurotic imagination of some obsessive nerd living in the attic of the family home.
I mean, really, look at the photos of the 'anniversary'. The shadows are all wrong and real humans couldn't possibly look like that and still be viable life forms.
We're all made up! Get over it!
I for one welcome our insane overlord and give thanks that she (yes 'she' so it's really our Overlady) created someone as beautiful and intelligent as me and allows me to imagine her alone and in 'all her glory' (winkwinkwinkwinkwink!).
I won't even get into the strange but wonderful things she makes me do (winkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwinkwink!).
Looked pretty plastic to me, whiners.
And my GPS works from directly inside my car.
Who says it needs to be working on the actual flight, just on and off. You can see the image is made up of direct lines.
Loops made by visiting small islands?
Yes, it does seem far fetched, and its not "documented" (proven) that well really.
NMEA logs could be faked also.
> P.S. GPS gets confused on Eurostar trains as well. It doesn't expect cars to be driving at 186 mph
You're obviously getting GPS (Global Positioning System) confused with satellite navigation (AKA sat-nav; the practice of deriving your location from GPS and then plotting a course to take).
My GPS was perfectly happy on Eurostar - shame we only ever went at 185mph!
Paris because I'd like to ride her at 186mph too!
"Did you see the size of those things in that suitcase? It's certainly no stock battery."
Say they're 50amp-hour batteries (about half of a 90amphour leisure battery), that GPS has to draw no more than 38mA. It's not impossible, just not very likely.
And the route, again, not impossible but hightly unlikely, the flight path would not get permission, they've listed a bunch of coordinates, but that doesn't explain the loops, since planes follow flight paths they can't just decide to fly to go flying around without clearance for their flight plan.
It seems unlikely they went looping in Iraq for example:
N 34.9850° E 42.7697° & KIRKUK
Their insurers would not give them permission, a quick search shows their flights into Bagdad occasionally get shot at.
Then there's the signal problem, it isn't a case of weak signal = inaccurate. You just can't get a lock if you can't get multiple signals that can be distinguished from noise.
But that's all irrelevant. If you wanted to make that with a GPS device, stick it in the test rig at my old office (I worked on these) and simulate the path on a test rig.
What I reckon they did is hand the coordinates of DHL depots to the advertising agency and they drew a picture through those coordinates and a few others and invented a story to go with it. Make a few photo shoots, try to make a viral.
Doubtful... I've tried turning on my GPS on a plane before, cos budget flights never have the fun "What the toilet will currently flush on" tracking displayed for us cattle... I've never managed to get a satellite lock, and I've tried with 2 different units.
Then of course there's the matter of batteries, as has been mentioned a few times, and of course the odds on a UPS package correctly making that many trips without an extended stay in Germany via Heathrow terminal 5... They're so low they rival our Eurovision odds!
So add one vote to the "it's a 5 minute job with paint"
"I for one welcome our insane overlord and give thanks that she (yes 'she' so it's really our Overlady) created someone as beautiful and intelligent as me and allows me to imagine her alone and in 'all her glory' (winkwinkwinkwinkwink!)."
You forgot the Overlady's icon foolish man.
Paris - because to look upon the face of The Goddess, is to know madness itself.
You all are going off of your experiences with little handheld GPS devices. To get a proper signal you need a powered antenna which is mostly larger than your entire handheld. I have seen some impressive GPS kit that worked in a basement of a large reinforced concrete building, thanks to multiple large high-sensitivity antennas. I've also spec'd some nice embedded GPS chips that will run on very little power, mostly thanks to the fact that GPS signals only update once a second, so they can sleep something like 99.9% of the time. As others have mentioned, 10 minute intervals would be plenty for the scale involved, and the equipment could drop to a low power (think .002 Watts) mode for a serious amount of time. And who says that it never got charged for the whole trip?
Still it does look like it's rather unlikely that they did much flying over the middle east and certain bits of Africa.
Plus, doesn't it seem like a colossal waste of time? Then again, in marketing terms, some GPS hardware and 55,000 miles or whatever of flight time is probably rather cheap. That's like 1/7th of a second of Super Bowl advert time.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2038701/%27Biggest-drawing-in-world%27-revealed-as-hoax.html
Oh well.
"Say they're 50amp-hour batteries (about half of a 90amphour leisure battery), that GPS has to draw no more than 38mA. It's not impossible, just not very likely."
As stated by myself and others, you get around this problem by sleeping the vast majority of the time. Unless you already calc'ed that in...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
