Cannot assign “stationary” segment to a location

The “stationary” segment alway come back to the “taxi” event even if I assign it to the previous place visit.

Hi @extrawdw!

This is a common problem, unfortunately. It will be because the stationary samples fall outside the “gravity well” of the visit you’re trying to assign them to, so they keep getting pushed back out into the adjacent trip item (ie the taxi ride).

You can hopefully partially work around it by tapping on the stationary segment and choosing “Slit segment”, then splitting in half, with second half taxi, first half stationary. Then you can try assigning that half portion to the visit instead of the whole.

With some fiddling like that you can usually get it into an acceptable state, though not always.

The other workaround is to assign that stationary segment to a different place than the previous visit. For example it might represent a bunch of recorded data in a hotel lobby or building carpark or some such. By creating a new place (eg “Parking”) and assigning it to that you can avoid the problem of it falling outside of the previous visit’s gravity well.

I often do this for parking and lobbies etc. If that’s genuinely what the data represents then it ultimately means you get a more accurate and detailed timeline.

Though sometimes it just represents badly aligned location data - iPhones don’t get everything right, and there’s only so much they can do in terms of location data accuracy in some cases. So if the data really does just represent a bit of annoying drift and not something genuine, you’re stuck with trying the first “split segment” workaround and hoping you can get it mostly sensible that way.

Is there a way to adjust the “gravity well” of a location manually? For me, I usually work out in one specific part of the gym, but if I sometimes work out in another part, Arc would think it’s part of walking home after the workout. The gym is large—30,000 square foot. I just want to mark the entire area of the gym as the gym, rather than Arc guessing based on where I am inside the gym.

Unfortunately for now there’s no way to adjust the gravity well. Though my tentative plan for solving this problem is to have that happen automatically, by way of the Place and/or Visit having multiple centres of gravity instead of just one.

So the idea would be that if you spend some time in the gym in the changing room, then over in the weights area, then in the cardio area, then back to the changing room, that might end up being four centres for the Visit, and would solve the problem of having to use the workaround of breaking the Visit up into multiple separate Visits or even separate places.

The challenge will be to work out how to do that on a technical level. But it’s not the most complex problem ever solved for Arc! So I’m confident it’s doable.

For now the workaround is to break it up into separate Visits, and potentially for different Places, if necessary.

For big places like airports I find that they end up breaking up into multiple Visits to the same Place (eg multiple Visits to “Don Mueang Airport”), with short walks between them. But if the Place is big but not quite that big, then sometimes you need to create separate Places. Typically for me that’s places like “Parking”, “Lobby”, etc.

But yeah, eventually I will solve this one so that it deals with it automatically! I think the plan is good. Just a matter of finding time to spend on it.

1 Like