The FOAM Trust Zone program allows groups that provide location services to manage equipment, complete tasks such as running tests, and give feedback to aid the improvement of parameters.
In late October 2022, Smart Island teamed up with FOAM for a pioneering project, setting up Europe’s first FOAM Trust Zone to explore new localisation technology.
The starting point of the project was to build out the radios from scratch, using components sent over from the USA, along with various compatible items we sourced in Europe (which was fun!). We then spent a month testing to fine-tune the transmission.
In early December, we installed the bespoke radio nodes on rooftops at different heights and distances to simulate a realistic environment for testing how effectively the FOAM technology operated. The goal was to conduct tests and share the findings for assessment.
The FOAM Trust Zone program allows groups that provide location services to manage equipment, complete tasks, and give feedback to help refine & improve parameters.
FOAM Location is an innovative system that uses a network of radios to provide secure location services without relying on traditional systems like GPS. It’s designed to be open for anyone to use and can operate on its own, ensuring secure and reliable location data.
What differentiates FOAM from traditional positioning systems like GPS is that FOAM is bi-directional.
This means that users broadcast a radio message to check in at the Zone, and then in turn the Zone confirms receipt with a Token minted on the blockchain which represents their location at that time. This brings a new primitive to developers in Web3 and beyond – provable location data – to unlock innovative new applications.
The main purpose of the Trust Zone project was to test FOAM Location under various conditions, try out different setups, and monitor how the current radio technology performs.
This was key in gathering data to improve the technology in the wild.
The FOAM team are actively working to refine their system based on the findings of these results, and they plan to keep testing further localisation methods and improvements later this year.
This project is part of an ongoing effort to advance how we use technology to determine location, aiming to make it more secure and reliable for everyone and is definitely one to look out for in the DePIN space.