Casio to launch a GPS camera that geotags indoors !

During my career in the avionics industry one of the companies I worked for designed and manufactured electro-mechanical inertial navigation systems for military aircraft. Back in the 80s the leading edge systems began to integrate with the map display for the crew to see details of their route and mission waypoints. Wind forward 20 or so years and that technology is placed in the palm of your hand for geophotography (photography with geotags).

The new CASIO Exilim EX-H20G camera, due on sale in the US in November 2010, features a Hybrid-GPS sensor which augments the normal GPS data feed with indoor tracking information maintained by a chip based motion sensor. So the location data for the photographic geotags is maintained upto date by an estimated position calculated from the speed and acceleration observbed by the motion sensors similar to my in-car gps which continues to track location as I drive through the Dartford tunnel under the Thames.

All the usual compact digital camera features are included and these are summarised at Photographyblog and it should deliver good quality images if my other Exlim camera was anythiong to go by. There are detailed spec sheets and more info at Imaging Resource .

It will be the first such system available to geotaggers and will succeed if the GPS start up time is short and both outdoor and indoor locations are accurate. See the full CASIO USA Press Release here.