Simone wrote about indoor location systems earlier in this blog. It reminded me about one fancy indoor location demo by Nokia NRC at Nokia World 2010:
Nokia World 2010 - What if you could navigate also indoors?
As we can see from the video, indoor location system in this demo provides accurate location, map of the indoor area and real-time location sharing between users. These features were utilized to show two potential use cases for this technology. The First one was to show how different user’s location could be displayed in the map and the second was to show usefulness of indoor navigation.
These two demoed use cases are not tied just for events like Nokia World. Personally I would love to use indoor navigation in big super markets (like big Prisma) where it is some times pretty painful to find some specific item or some staff member, who could help you to find it. It would be so useful for me just to download store’s “map” when I enter and after that I could just ask some items location from my device and after that my device could guide me to the right spot. At the work I have similar problem with meeting rooms especially form different building and that's why I have meeting room map pictures in my phone and I use those, if I have troubles to remember meeting rooms location.
Indoor location sharing could be also useful. Personally I would find it useful to share my location at work so that somebody, who is looking for me, could see if I am sitting in my cubicle or lab. This would remove need for phone call to find my location. Of course this indoor location sharing could be a problem for somebody, but for me it is not a problem since my presence at the work can be tracked from many other sources.
I agree with you fully....I also think we need to have more of inddor navigation tools because places are getting more complex (not only because of size, also because of architecture....).
ReplyDeleteThe possibility of communication designers, who should for instance help you to find your way through several places, are hitting barriers without the use of mobile devices.
Just think of how useful it would be to find a book in the library with a navigation app which shows you the exact shelf!!