Null Island is also the place where so many self-driving cars, UAVs, and navigation systems achieve their best possible performance.
I've run across multiple products that represent latitude and longitude as floats internally. At double precision, this is suitable for most purposes... but it does mean that positional precision is maximized in and around Null Island, and slowly decays as you move away.
I do wish more folks would represent latitude and longitude as binary angular measure, or other sane fixed point representation.
Using zero as a default (the main topic of this article) is one thing... I'm pointing out that floating point is able to represent points with greater density near Null Island than it is in, say, Alaska, just due to the spacing between pronounceable coordinates.
Games also have this issue, with some creative solutions.
Paraphrasing a GDC talk, in Outer Wilds space travel would not work properly -- in that the player character would move around a dynamic solar system with a pivot point and planets moving about.
Instead they made the player the world origin (0, 0, 0), and the player 'moving' actually moved the world around instead, thus moving objects were tracked more accurately the closer they are to you!
I've run across multiple products that represent latitude and longitude as floats internally. At double precision, this is suitable for most purposes... but it does mean that positional precision is maximized in and around Null Island, and slowly decays as you move away.
I do wish more folks would represent latitude and longitude as binary angular measure, or other sane fixed point representation.