How Pointr Changed the Game with Indoor Blue Dot Technology

When Bluetooth 4.0 released in 2010, it was hailed as, among many other things, the future of precise indoor wayfinding tech. Why? Without getting into the technical weeds, it introduced the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) standard which made it possible to build Bluetooth beacons that could accurately position people inside a building and run on a single button cell battery for months or even years. Companies rushed to build indoor mapping and wayfinding solutions around BLE beacons — until they flopped. Users ignored the maps, venues ripped the beacons out, and the industry largely moved on.

So what went wrong? And are beacons on the cusp of a major comeback?

Let’s take a trip in my time machine to learn about the challenges. Then we’ll return to the future to learn how Pointr is pioneering new territory in indoor location and wayfinding.

The devil in the details

Put up enough Bluetooth beacons around shopping malls, airports, and office buildings, map the space, write software to connect the signals to a mapping and wayfinding app, and BAM! Indoor location and wayfinding solved. That was the idea.

It turns out the industry had a lot to learn about making and deploying BLE beacon tech and apps useful.

Not so simple deployment

Your average BLE beacon can broadcast a signal up to about 70 meters when unobstructed. In theory, you could deploy beacons evenly across a building with some overlap, and you’d get complete coverage. Architects and the laws of physics would tend to disagree.

For one thing, Bluetooth signals don’t penetrate walls. They don’t wrap around corners very well. They’re susceptible to interference from common objects and structures inside buildings. And beacons can’t be placed just anywhere because of surface material and texture on walls and ceilings.

As a science teacher probably once taught you, we humans have a whole lot of water inside us. We’re literally getting in our own way when trying to use BLE beacons for precise personal location. Put lots of people into a tight space—say, an airport security area, a crowded event venue, or a bustling office building—and the Bluetooth signal starts running into serious trouble.

Beyond the restrictions of physics, deployment could be complicated and costly. Originally, different beacon brands didn’t work with each other and didn’t work in concert with WiFi access points. If a building already had beacons installed for other purposes, you had to get beacons of that same brand or spend extra for beacons in redundant areas. 

Time and testing were needed to overcome these challenges.

Mapping a building: a maze with moving walls

Let’s suppose you solve beacon deployment. You can get 100% coverage and 100% accuracy 100% of the time without fail. The next piece of the puzzle is actually mapping the space.

Imagine an office building with dozens of floors, hundreds or thousands of offices, meeting rooms, closets, common areas, hallways, foyers, shops, stands, elevators, stairs, escalators, and maintenance corridors. Now add all the obstacles in each one. Desks, chairs, couches, counters, pillars, planters, fountains, art pieces, barriers, rails, and more. The complete picture shows all the places people may want to go and all the things that get in their way.

Each facet of the building has to be meticulously considered and added to the map. Without this level of care, an indoor wayfinding app could lead people through the tables of a food court or lead someone in a wheelchair along a path with stairs or an escalator. Digitizing a map and adding wayfinding routes for maximum usability and accessibility could take weeks for each map.

The problem of scale

Now think about mapping more than one building. Suppose a large department store with 200 locations wants to add mapping and wayfinding for each. Department stores tend to have similar layouts, but are rarely identical. Each map requires individual attention to survey the space, plan for routes, and draw the map. At only two days per map as a best case scenario, mapping all 200 stores would take just over a year and a half—without working weekends.

For more complex spaces, the total time frame could balloon to three or four years. On that time scale, some buildings could close down, undergo renovation, or simply have some shelves and tables rearranged—all common for retail spaces. This creates a moving target for drawing, digitizing, and maintaining maps. Worse, many providers didn’t offer a CMS (Content Management System) that customers could use to make small changes to the map. Every update was another email.

Having the BLE tech in hand was all well and good. But no one could figure out how to solve mapping at scale. Many companies enjoyed the wayfinding tech demos, but they didn’t find it worth the investment to adopt.

Bad user experience = no users

Some companies made a decent run at deployment and refined mapping processes to an impressive degree. But none managed to place the final piece of the puzzle—the user experience.

To make indoor blue dot work, people have to like using it. You can make a beacon that costs $10 and lasts 10 years on a single button cell battery and map a whole building in a day. But if people find the mapping and wayfinding features frustrating, they’ll abandon the app and never return. All that time, money, and effort for deployment and mapping, lost to a bad first impression.

Limited by the technology of the time

Most of the early problems with the user experience came down to device limitations. In 2010 when BLE was released, smartphones were still pretty new to the world and not many people had them. For the folks who did have them, the smartphones of the day were far less advanced than what we have now. No gyroscope. No magnetometer. Even the iPhone didn’t get GPS until the iPhone 3G released in 2008, about two years before Bluetooth 4.0 landed.

Fast forward 10 years, and nearly everyone had a smartphone. Those smartphones generally had all those fancy sensors that help determine which direction someone is facing and moving, how they’re holding their phone, and generally where in the world they are. Even with more sensors, faster processors, and better battery life, the user experience remained messy because of poor implementation.

“Start walking”

First, users often had to calibrate their devices by moving around or waving their phone in a specific pattern to start navigating. They also had to recalibrate from time to time. For people used to a Google Maps style experience that just starts in a couple seconds, this was a lot of fuss that didn’t always work the first time.

Once people started navigating, they might find their blue dot moving through a wall, jumping 10 meters in any direction, or freezing for a few seconds while the system worked to find them again as they moved out of one beacon’s range and into another. And transitioning from inside to outside or floor to floor? Forget about it. 

Oh, and that “Low Energy” part? Devices struggled to stay connected to the location network and power-hungry wayfinding apps drained batteries just as fast as before BLE.

Not-so human interface

Many indoor location companies only focused on nailing the mechanics of position and wayfinding and neglected the fine details of the user experience. 

If you open a map, and every POI (point of interest) icon instantly assaults your face, it’s immediately overwhelming. If you have trouble seeing, and the app doesn’t read out turn by turn directions, it’s not serving you. If the app doesn’t let you search for items and locations, you have to manually scroll all over the map to find what you’re looking for. If you tap a POI hoping to find information about a product, and you get nothing, you have to leave the map interface to look up the information elsewhere or go find the item on the shelf. Maybe it turns out it’s not what you needed.

These are only a few out of a multitude of considerations that either add up to a good user experience or a bad one. Many companies never quite got the right recipe.

So with this trifecta of challenges—beacon deployment, mapping at scale, and user experience—each with its own host of puzzles and problems, how did Pointr solve it? Jump back into my DeLorean. We’re going back to our (legally-distinct) future.

Nailing the details: The Pointr story

Pointr was founded on a vision for indoor location: Make indoor blue dot work by doing the whole package right. We’ve studied, tested, documented, failed, succeeded, cried, laughed, and worked our way to the realization of that vision. Over the past 12 years, we’ve made a science out of indoor mapping and wayfinding so that we can even rapidly deploy for large events.

Here’s how we did it.

Why Bluetooth beacons rule (for now)

Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about other location tech. At this point, BLE beacons are kind of old news, and they’ve developed a reputation for being...not great. People often ask us why we don’t go beaconless with geomagnetic or GPS, use ultra wideband (UWB) technology, or just use WiFi APs (access points). If you want the full story on these technologies and how they fit into the indoor positioning landscape, we have some excellent pieces you can read, linked below. For now, here’s a very quick summary:

• Geomagnetic - Surveying the earth’s magnetic “fingerprint” in and around your building and using it for beaconless navigation sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. Unfortunately, magnetic fields shift all the time, so geomagnetic systems need frequent new surveys, a lengthy, manual (and therefore expensive) process that doesn’t scale well.

• UWB - Ultra Wideband is a promising new innovation that generally offers better accuracy, lower energy usage, and better data transfer rates than BLE. We’re watching the tech closely, but it’s still pretty new compared to Bluetooth. This means UWB beacons are expensive and few modern phones support it. Sound familiar? It may be that we one day say farewell to BLE beacons in favor of UWB, but that’s a decade or two off.

• GPS - You’ve probably noticed that Google Maps or Apple Maps have a hard time finding you inside a mall or airport. It’s an inherent problem with GPS signals that remains unsolved, even with GPS repeaters. GPS is also extremely power hungry and therefore not practical. 

• WiFi - We often do use WiFi APs, but WiFi signals don’t always reach every corner of a building, and they don’t have the accuracy of Bluetooth beacons. However, ‘beacon WiFi’ exists, which is when a WiFi device also has bluetooth capabilities. We use these exclusively when available, and we can supplement them with Bluetooth beacons when needed for better accuracy.

I’ll say it plainly—BLE beacons still aren’t perfect, but they sit in the “sweet spot” between accuracy, cost, and compatibility. And BLE beacons are only one part of the equation. Pointr is a software company first, and we use whatever hardware works best to achieve a great blue dot experience. Over the years, we’ve evaluated a wide range of technologies, and our R&D team remains at the forefront of innovation, continually testing the latest advancements.

Deployment as a science

Through years of testing and hard-earned experience with buildings of all kinds, we’ve developed processes and patented Deep Location® algorithms to optimize beacon location and enhance beacon signals through Sensor Fusion. That’s the fancy marketing way to say we figured out how to use a combination of BLE beacons, Bluetooth-enabled WiFi Access Points, smart lighting, and IoT devices already in buildings to get consistent, reliable signals every time.

First, we use our Beacon Planner and a detailed building map to do a preliminary layout. Looking at a simple, top-down map of the building and laying out enough beacons for square footage isn’t enough. Beacons installed with adhesive backings won’t stick to fire retardant surfaces. Beacons placed too close to pillars, metal beams, bundles of cables, pipes, and even windows may not perform well. So the last phase in beacon planning is a site survey that accounts for building topography and material, likely crowd density, and more. 

When the plan is complete, we send our installation team to install beacons—or maybe not. With more recent advancements like Bluetooth 5 and the proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) tech, Pointr can more and more often use a building’s existing Bluetooth beacons, smart lighting, and WiFi devices for blue dot. For example, we installed zero beacons at The Venetian in Las Vegas for CES 2025 because we used their existing WiFi APs, which was a huge success for our blue dot tech at a large event.

When beacon installation is necessary, our team does it quickly with practiced precision. The streamlining we’ve achieved means we can go from start to installation in days instead of weeks.

MapScale to the rescue

It wasn’t until the last couple of years that we finally solved mapping at scale, and it’s thanks to AI mapping tech. We trained a custom LLM on thousands of building maps to create MapScale®, a patented AI that can process and digitize the CAD (Computer Aided Design) file for an entire building with 90% accuracy in minutes.

When MapScale is done working its magic, humans clean up the edges, double-check that everything is where it should be, and verify wayfinding routes. With our multi modal update coming in Q2 of 2025, MapScale’s accuracy will get even better.

So we can digitize a map and make wayfinding routes really quickly. What about maintaining the map? What about map customization? Yeah, we have those in spades. 

We train our customers to use our Pointr Cloud CMS (Content Management System). Sections of the airport or mall closed for renovation? Need to redraw a POI boundary, add details, or add a new geofence? Pointr Cloud was designed to be easy to use and intuitive, allowing self-service map updates in seconds instead of days or weeks.

Good user experience in seconds

Make a user experience that people don’t close in disgust. That’s a low bar. Make a user experience that people like using. That’s what we aim for and what we’ve achieved. The recipe for our UX success comes down to these features:

• User-friendly, intuitive interface

• Instant blue dot location

• Precise position with no lag

• Smart rerouting

• Smooth floor and building transitions

• Rich POI information

• Battery-optimized

• Accessibility features

• Flexible, intuitive management dashboard

• Hardware agnostic

• Unlimited users

When people open a Pointr map, they’re greeted with a visually pleasing, uncluttered interface, and the blue dot representing their exact location appears instantly. With familiar, intuitive zoom, pan, rotate, drag, and select actions, users feel right at home. As they zoom and focus on specific areas of the map, we present more levels of detail at the right time.

Rich POI details with descriptions, images, keywords, hours of operation, and links tell people what they want to know. Keeping these details always up to date is simple with our API, which lets you pull in information and metadata from nearly any external system.

Whether people are wandering or using turn by turn navigation to get somewhere specific, they trigger location-based push notifications and app states as they pass through geofences. And they always know where they are, even as they transition from inside to outside or from one floor to another.

When people start navigating to a POI, our patented algorithms for position and orientation accuracy, floor detection, smart rerouting, and indoor/outdoor transitions provide a smooth, consistent experience with no random jumps, stutters, or delays—all while using minimal battery.

...and beyond

The work isn’t done. There are still challenges to overcome, puzzles to be solved, and new horizons coming into view with each technological advancement. But we’ve proved that blue dot navigation can be implemented quickly, at scale, with an experience that delights from the moment someone opens the map.

As the legendary LeVar Burton said, “Don’t take my word for it.” Check out our growing list of success stories, case studies, and webinars to learn how Pointr is continuing to revolutionize workplaces, healthcare campuses, airports, events, retail, hospitality, and more.