Indoor Navigation: Emerging Tech Revolution

It’s impossible to deny the nigh-on revolutionary effect that Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and all of the features built upon it have had on our lives.

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

WHY IT’S THE ‘NEXT BIG THING’ FOR SMARTPHONES

It has been instrumental in improving military accuracy, as well as bringing a new level of sophistication to transportation and traffic features around the globe. Now, though, it seems that another navigation revolution is at hand: the emergence of indoor positioning technology.

At the most basic level, indoor positioning – or indoor navigation – can be understood as a shrinking of GPS and related technology to indoor spaces. This raises the possibility of its everyday use for mapping, showing and exploring buildings’ internal compartments, including the likes of public buildings, shopping malls, big stores, parks, garages, and perhaps even your own home.

In theory, indoor navigation could be a frontier that upends how we make our way around the world – or at least, the indoor spaces in which we human beings spend about 70% of our time – to a similar degree to the first GPS technology as far as outdoor navigation was concerned. So, what are the enthralling possibilities for this fast-developing tech, and what are the risks we must be aware of?

TAKING ACCURACY, DETAIL AND USEFULNESS A STEP FURTHER THAN GPS

There have been no shortage of suggestions thus far for how indoor navigation technology could profoundly shape how we use our devices to get from A to B – and then onto C, D, E and right through the alphabet. It has been claimed to be a crucial step in improving the accuracy and detail of the mapping of spaces, to say nothing of the possibilities when it is allied to such other emerging tech as augmented reality (AR).