DO YOU ever find yourself in a vast shopping centre or airport wishing you could use something like GPS to help you find your way? That could soon happen with the development of indoor versions of the system.
"Thank the furniture gods," was one tweeted response to news that IKEA's cavernous couch emporia are getting a smartphone-based indoor positioning system (IPS) developed by Google.
The search giant is not alone: Nokia, Sensewhere, based in Edinburgh, UK, and Cambridge Silicon Radio, also in the UK, are all getting in on the IPS act. Each announced offerings last week that use slightly different technological approaches to stop people getting lost indoors.
The new systems are needed as GPS signals can't reliably be received in a building. Google's IPS offering is an extension of its Maps software, which uses GPS, cellphone and Wi-Fi signals to calculate where a user is outdoors.
To ensure a person walking from the street into a large indoor space gets a seamless experience, the latest version of Maps drops the GPS once inside and measures the signal strength from Wi-Fi routers and cellphone towers to triangulate their location. Users of Android-equipped phones can now use the service in number of major airports, branches of Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Home Depot and Ikea - plus the giant Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Wi-Fi signals emanating from businesses throughout a building lets the system work out where you are to within 5 metres.
Nokia's version of IPS, not yet available to consumers, aims for even greater precision. The firm litters buildings of interest with Bluetooth-based radio beacons that switch phones running mapping apps based on GPS to using Bluetooth 4.0 signals once they walk indoors. Because the beacons are at fixed sites and have a short range, they can work out your position to within 30 centimetres - enough to "bookmark" a jacket in a shop window and browse back to it later.
Another approach to accuracy is being taken by Sensewhere, whose smartphone-based IPS is being tested in Edinburgh's Gyle shopping mall. The company says that the main problem with relying on maps of Wi-Fi networks to find your position is that routers get disconnected, thrown out or switched off. To get round this, Sensewhere's app frequently files reports to its database on how the radio environment has changed, meaning its IPS maps "automatically self-improve" says a spokesperson.
A further way to boost IPS accuracy is to use data from phone accelerometers to calculate how far someone has moved since the last radio fix. On 2 November, Cambridge Silicon Radio launched a line of microchips that do just that, adding inertial data to that gleaned from Wi-Fi and cellphones. The firm hopes the chips will make IPS adoption by phone makers more likely.
The challenges for all these IPS vendors, says Bob Cockshott, a GPS expert with the UK's National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, is to ensure that physical changes to the environment don't ruin position fixes. "The big issue for indoor positioning is that once you have mapped the radio [signals] in a space, just doing something as simple as moving a metal filing cabinet could change the paths the radio waves take - and that will lower accuracy."
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