ContactRealizing the Promise of Indoor Mapping
A whole host of companies are at work in the indoor mapping arena, from map builders to application developers, including, among others, Point Inside, Trimble, Ericsson Labs, NAVTEQ, Microsoft BING, Micello, Pole Star, Senion Lab and Google. They’re hard at work creating real-life representational maps of indoor locations and venues, making a building’s interior and its contents viewable and navigable for visitors to the physical site. The applications and locations range from retail to public spaces to large campuses. The needs vary from accurate indoor maps for first responders to aisle-by-aisle store layouts for retail merchandisers and marketers to social networking friend finders.
The approaches to indoor mapping are varied too... some use crowd sourcing, some use lasers and geo-tagged video, robotic map data gathering is sprouting up, and some approaches involve “walk-around” data collection (think pedestrian version of the Google Earth vehicle). The result is a vector map of the interior space onto which Point-of-Interest (POI) data and images can be overlaid.and geo-coded. But those methods are costly, time consuming, and only as effective as they are accurate. Loctronix plays a critical role in improving these shortcomings.
A recent article in TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid discussed Google Maps 6.0 upgrade which included better indoor mapping capabilities. Jason wrote “Yes, you’ll now be able to fire up Maps in some malls, airports, and department stores to get your bearings, complete with that ‘little blue dot’ that shows you where you are.” Speaking specifically about Google’s approach Jason stated “The feature is also going to be at the mercy of the various wireless signals your phone is receiving. GPS signals are rarely available indoors, so the app will primarily be taking advantage of cell tower signals and Wi-Fi networks to determine your location. If those aren’t available, accuracy will suffer.” Loctronix’ approach relieves that potential suffering for its positioning technology doesn’t require pre-surveying of Wi-Fi network topology or communication with a location servers like Google’s does.
It is clear there is high interest and many market applications for indoor mapping just waiting for an accurate positioning technology like Loctronix offers.
For more information see our discussion of markets and applications.