Ooru

Nested three-word spatial addressing

Every 12.5 m square in Chennai has three words. Unlike what3words, they tell you where you are.

Word one names a 5 km region, word two a 250 m locality, word three a 12.5 m spot inside it. The words at each level are arranged by meaning, so nearby places sound alike — and any prefix is itself a valid, coarser address.

///cavern.organza.panther

Marina Beach, Triplicane

Open the mapReport a power cutRead the method

Three words, three scales

Each level divides its parent into an exact 20 × 20 block, so containment is exact by construction and reading the address is reading the hierarchy.

  1. Word 1 · Regioncavern5 km squarewhich 5 km part of the metropolitan area. Drawn from landscape & water.
  2. Word 2 · Localityorganza250 m squarewhich 250 m block within that region. Drawn from materials, colour & texture.
  3. Word 3 · Spotpanther12.5 m squarewhich 12.5 m square within that block. Drawn from living things.

Hierarchical, so it is truncatable

Share just the first word to give your position to 5 km and no finer. Progressive disclosure is a privacy control that a flat scheme structurally cannot offer.

Topological, so neighbours exist

Adjacency is a ±1 step in a mixed-radix lattice. You can ask for the cell to the east, walk a row, or test containment by comparing prefixes — no geometry required.

Honest about what it costs

A wrong word lands you nearby rather than on another continent, which makes mistakes quiet. That trade-off is measured, published, and shown on every address.

Applications on the grid

An addressing model is infrastructure. Here is what stands on it.

Every 12.5 m cell can carry a signal, and every resident is a sensor for something the city cannot see from its control rooms. The first application listens for the lights going out.

Application · live in Chennai

Power cuts, reported on the grid

Standing in a dark house? Tap the cell you are in and report it — no account, no form, a three-word address is all that leaves your phone. Reports from 3 different networks confirm one another into a street or a neighbourhood, every outage carries how long it has run and which tier of the electricity board to call, and a tap on 1912 or WhatsApp draws your call on the map so the next person knows someone has rung. When nothing is real, a simulated day of Chennai’s outages replays in 2 and a half minutes so the map is never empty.

  • Live reports from where you stand, no sign-in
  • Confirmed by neighbours, never by one device
  • Whom to call, by the size of the outage
  • Your 1912 or WhatsApp call, drawn on the map
Open the outages mapHow it works

Up to 3 reports per device, each standing 10 minutes unless you come back — longer once neighbours confirm it. Nothing is archived.

14:15 on the simulated day: 39 dark localities in amber over the board’s 126 substations. Drawn from the data, not a screenshot.

Places you know

All 41 places
1,92,00,000addressable squares
920words, three domains
EPSG:32644UTM zone 44N
1.32×semantic coherence vs chance

Questions

How is this different from what3words?
what3words is deliberately flat and scrambled: every square is the same size and neighbouring squares have unrelated words, so a mistake lands on another continent and is obviously wrong. Ooru is the inverse — the three words are nested (5 km, then 250 m, then 12.5 m) and drawn from semantically ordered vocabularies, so the address tells you where you are and can be truncated to disclose less.
What area does it cover?
A fixed 50 km by 60 km extent anchored in UTM zone 44N over the Chennai Metropolitan Area, from Ennore in the north to Muttukadu in the south and out past Poonamallee in the west.
How precise is an address?
Three words name a 12.5 m square — about 156.25 m², roughly a doorway. That is finer than the accuracy of a phone's GNSS fix, which is the limit that actually matters.
Do I need an account or an API key?
No. Encoding and decoding are pure arithmetic over a committed word table — there is no database and no lookup service. The map works without any API key at all.
Can I report a power cut?
Yes. Open the outages map, tap the 12.5 m cell you are standing in — or use your location — and press Report. There is no account: the report is a three-word cell that lapses after 10 minutes unless you come back, reports from 3 different networks confirm one another into a street or a neighbourhood, and every dark cell shows which tier of the electricity board to call.