Indoor GPS Positioning Technology in works to help find nearest bathroom!
October 18, 2008 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Nokia
What sucks about today’s GPR positioning technology is that it really just works outdoors. Sometimes, we feel the need to go into a more “macro” level of positioning especially when we’re inside a mall or a huge office building that’s unfamiliar to us and we need to find the nearest bathroom for that !!! huge emergency !!!.
Nokia has been working on a triangulating technology that uses WLAN to find your mobile phone and project you in relartion to everything else in the building:
The mobile uses the buildings’ WLAN infrastructure to triangulate your position and then indicates where you are on a building map. Nokia prototypes today can show your location – building section and floor level. They allow you to browse the building, find points of interest and you can even share your position with the people you choose, when you want. Today Nokia has Indoor Positioning trials ongoing within 40 buildings worldwide.[Nokia]
So it isn’t just bathrooms – it’s everything and to be honest I feel that this is more useful than the “macro” GPS technology. Now if only malls and establishments could have a standard to use to allow this system to scale, wow.
[Photo c/o Nokia]
Hi. Interesting to read your article on using mobiles indoors to find the nearest bathroom. I have worked for almost 2 years now on just such an application. I have mapped a very large 4-level 300 store shopping mall onto my mobile. Idealy the app should be able to locate your mobile in the mall automatically but it seems such technology is still in its infancy. I think the best indoor location technology can only locate to within 10 m which is not accurate enough to find the nearest bathroom. You might end up doing it in the hair salon next door. So what I did was use a very clever trick to enable the user to manually find current position. I now have a fully working mall map (wayfinding tool) which I am trying to take to market. It shows you all of the 300 store locations, the nearest bathroom, the banking machines, the Info desks in the mall and even where is the nearest elevator or escalator. It can even help you find where you parked your car. Would welcome some discussion on this if you like. You can e-mail me at the address above. I am now thinking of further uses for my code in wayfinding apps. I have quite a passion for this wayfinding thing. Thanks.
Paul,
I learned you have developed a new technique for indoor positioning. I’m curious if it’s in the market now and which mobile platform(s) are you targeting.
Thanks.
Hi Avshin
Thanks for your interest. Actually its not a new way of indoor location but it is a wayfinding tool for indoor navigation. I am at the moment finalising it to enter in the Adobe competition which closes this Sunday.
It is built to navigate a large shopping mall. It actually mimics your outdoor car gps system in that it does everything your car system does except find the shortest route and give verbal directions (but I’m working on this).
Since indoor position finding is not possible I have used a clever little trick to locate the phone but its not an automatic location. The user has to tell the app the name of the nearest store and then the app locates their position on the graphic from this.
Feel free to ask any more questions if you wish.
Thanks for your interest.
Paul
Hi Paul
Do you have a video or demo of the technology? Any luck in selling it?
Thanks, Gar