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It can be tedious while walking to constantly have to unlock your phone and view a screen in bright daylight. This is especially true if you need to remove gloves or glasses each time. With VozNav, you take an initial bearing from the screen, then lock your phone and put it away. Double-tap it when you want a voice update on your bearing and distance to the target. You can keep your hands free, your gloves and sunglasses on, and reduce the risk of dropping or damaging your phone.
I go walking quite a lot, and particular like wandering into the forest and hills off-trail. I like to have a general idea of the direction I am heading in, but decide the exact path based on the terrain around me. I've used various navigation apps, but all seem to suffer from a core annoyance... the need to unlock the phone to check progress.
I often wear headphones so initially got to thinking about whether I could use stereo sound to represent my target - maybe a ping that would pan left or right, and a tone that would change or pulse depending on the distance. After quite a lot of experimentation, I found that using the voice API was more precise and easier to interpret (I may revisit stereo tones later!). I can simply get the phone to tell me bearing and distance. The other advantage is that this works well with the phone's built-in speaker too.
Most mobiles these days have a compass to figure out direction, and GPS to find your location. I started with the assumption that a phone in a pocket could not really resolve direction reliably as would not be horizontal, so worked on figuring out direction based on movement, which would be independent of the orientation of the phone. After a few weeks, even with a lot of filtering experiments, I found it impossible to make this work. The speed of walking is too slow compared to the accuracy of the GPS.
But then I discovered that the magnetometer in phones works in 3 dimensions. So with suitable programming, a phone vertically in a pocket can give reliable direction info. I found this works best in a chest pocket, or a lanyard around your neck, where the phone is most stable.
Initially I had a configurable period - updates every 1, 2 mins, etc. But then got to thinking whether it was possible to have "updates on demand". The obvious way to tell the phone to give you an update was a tap on the case. After more experiments, I settled on a double-tap. This gave the best combination of reliable, simple triggering without false positives.
I still have a lot more planned, but I think this first version is useful enough to release now. It is Android only at present, but built in Maui, so I am looking at iOS later if there is demand there.
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About VozNav on Product Hunt
“The walking app you don't need to look at.”
VozNav was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 3 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #83 on the daily leaderboard. It can be tedious while walking to constantly have to unlock your phone and view a screen in bright daylight. This is especially true if you need to remove gloves or glasses each time. With VozNav, you take an initial bearing from the screen, then lock your phone and put it away. Double-tap it when you want a voice update on your bearing and distance to the target. You can keep your hands free, your gloves and sunglasses on, and reduce the risk of dropping or damaging your phone.
VozNav was featured in Android (57.1k followers), Maps (12.8k followers), Audio (2k followers) and Hiking (617 followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 45.2k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted VozNav?
VozNav was hunted by Paul James VG. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Paul James VG