Magellan Opening Up Off-Road Nav Units To Third Party Developer

Magellan is opening up the maps and navigation side of its Triton line to a company called Primordial. Primordial has received a lot of funding from the U.S. Army for its off-road navigation maps and methods.

[photo credit: CrunchGear]

Currently off-road navigation is quite abysmal, it doesn't really navigate you around anything except large bodies of water, and other than that, it just moves you in a straight line to your destination with no regard to the terrain, steep inclines or other land features that might be along that particular path. With Primordial helping out, they are faithful that they'll be so good at off-road navigation that they'll be able to navigate you around even dense forest, as well as man-made structures in the middle of the woods, and keep you away from steep inclines and deep ravines if you'd prefer.

Primordial's product that does all of this is called Ground Guidance, and it does all of this by analyzing land cover, elevation, and aerial photo databases. Their desktop software currently allows you to select routes with one of two things as your main concern, speed, or stealth, clearly made for the military, but I'll take it when that serial killer is chasing me, then you just load the map onto your mobile GPS unit and you are set to go. This could be the product that actually makes off-road GPS useful.

[via press release]