COSY will change the world - it’s the miracle of GPS brought indoors!
On July 22, 2015 a revolutionary new technology was piloted by COSY. It will transform the world for people who are blind, giving them independence which is identical or even superior to someone who is sighted. Say goodbye to the 70% unemployment rate for people who are visually impaired! Do you happen to be blessed with perfect vision? Don’t worry – we’re planning something for you too! Register here to follow us on our journey.
Cognitive Operational Systems, LLC (COSY to our friends) was born in September 2012. At the outset, the goal was to develop an app which would solve the indoor navigation challenge that GPS has so capably solved in most outdoor environments. Many companies are tackling this problem but the solutions tend to require infrastructural changes such as wifi or beacon installation. The COSY innovation was to leverage computer vision to provide beaconless guidance. The approach is similar to how robots navigate – science fiction becoming reality!
COSY is a diverse team of roboticists, entrepreneurs, and business people. We believe:
- in connecting people with their environment in new ways.
- people have a fundamental drive to explore the spaces and events around them.
- everyone should live in a world where you never miss an experience unless you want to miss it.
There are two components to COSY’s technology. The first component provides indoor navigation: turn-by-turn directions without using GPS, beacon, or wifi. The indoor navigation component is powered by a second component which collects extensive contextual information about the environment. COSY likes to think of it as an online experience in a bricks-and-mortar setting. When we’re on a computer or smartphone, we expect to have access to any bit of information ever generated. Don’t know the meaning of a word, need something translated, want to comparison shop, need travel directions? You’re at most a few clicks away from the answer you seek. Unfortunately, that same experience is often not available in complex indoor environments such as transit centers, malls, and entertainment venues. The COSY technology will bridge the gap, making indoor environments as accessible as GPS has made outdoor settings.
I mentioned accessible in the previous paragraph and that’s a key driver of our passion. For a person who is sighted, not having a GPS-like app for a mall is an inconvenience. For someone who is blind, a mall becomes virtually inaccessible without assistance. How would you like to need someone’s assistance every time you went shopping, took public transportation, or attended a convention? Perhaps you’re sighted and still thinking this might be a very helpful app? We agree and plan to make the COSY technology the indoor version of GPS.
Remember to register here to follow our journey.