This New Parking App Can Find Empty Spaces, No Sensors Required

    Parking sucks, and that's why there are plenty of apps to help your car find a vacant spot. Trouble is, those solutions tend to require expensive sensors to be installed in each and every one of those potentially open spots. A new app called PocketParker instead leverages the power of passive, portable sensors—the ones already installed your smartphone.

    A team from State University of New York at Buffalo is calling their idea "pocketsourcing," essentially crowdsourcing the location and movement of people who are parking their cars or about to abandon a spot. The app uses the accelerometer in your phone to measure and report behavior. So if you're moving at a slow automobile pace in the same general area, you're probably looking for a spot to park, which would mean the lot is full. If you're moving at walking-speed and then switch to car-speed and drive away, that's a sign that a spot was probably just vacated. By analyzing the logistical information from people who have installed the app on their phones, and cross-referencing the parking space data that's readily available on any mapping service (they use OpenStreetMap), PocketParker can make a fairly well-educated guess about how many open spaces are located near your car. In a test of 105 phones, double-checking with cameras, they got it right 19 out of 20 times. [MIT Technology Review]

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