Indoor Navigation

An indoor navigation app needs several fundamental components to work.

• A map of the area in question, or at least an understanding of the area’s paths and topography
• A way of fixing a user’s position in the environment
• A refresh rate that enables the user’s position to be tracked, along with other helpful information such as orientation and speed of travel
• An interface that can translate this data into a recognizable form for users - such as demonstrating where they’re currently located via a blue dot, and indicating where they need to go with a highlighted route

With all of this in place, the app is capable of providing a navigation experience. Of course, this is the most bare bones version of what can often be highly complicated systems. Many navigation apps enabled multiple stops, different types of points of interest, different navigation options (such as fastest route or least congested path). These options naturally require more complex systems.

Indoor navigation is a rapidly developing area, and the demand for indoor navigation systems is growing quickly. There are several reasons why so many major companies are investing in indoor navigation or are at least considering implementing a system, including:

• The number of uses - Indoor navigation has been found to be hugely beneficial to a vast array of different types of businesses. Hospitals have used them to help patients navigate vast complexes, reducing no-show appointments and saving millions of dollars per year in the process. Modern workplaces have twinned navigation systems with hot desking and room booking software to guide workers in unfamiliar areas of the office. Airports are leveraging systems to help guide travelers to their gate quickly and using the most efficient route possible.

• The ubiquity of outdoor navigation systems - People the world over are now used to using outdoor navigation apps such as Google Maps every day - certain navigation requests are searched for tens of millions of times per month in the US. Offering them the same experience indoors while competitors don’t is a huge selling point given that navigation systems now have billions of converts the world over. Eventually, indoor navigation will become an expectation, not a novelty, and the companies who adopted navigation systems first will be the leading beneficiaries.

While there are an increasing number of vendors offering indoor navigation system, Pointr are the market leaders for a reason. Using our Deep Location® technology, we’re able to provide outstanding accuracy. Our suite of mapping tools, including MapScale®, mean complete harmony between your indoor navigation and the map on which it’s built - no awkward integrations or unforeseen incompatibilities to worry about.

What’s more, we’re dedicated to continually iterating and improving our navigation solution. We work closely with our partners and clients to deliver the features and enhancements that will make the most impact on their businesses. One such feature is indoor-outdoor navigation, allowing users to navigate from building to building across a campus and then enter and navigate within one of those buildings, all within one single, seamless interface.

There are two key types of indoor wayfinding in common use today - dynamic and static wayfinding.

Dynamic wayfinding refers to the style of system most people would think of when they think of navigation tools. Indoor positioning technology is used to pinpoint a user’s live location within an indoor environment. Dynamic wayfinding is then layered on top of this foundation, enabling the user to select a destination (and potentially waypoints in between, as well as routing instructions, such as avoiding stairs), and then finding the best route from their current location. What makes this form of wayfinding dynamic is the fact that no matter where the user is within the location, the system is able to provide them with a route.

Static wayfinding doesn’t rely upon a system being able to locate a user via indoor positioning. Instead, it is set up only to account for direction requests made from specific points (most commonly, fixed terminals or kiosks that allow users to view maps). As these terminals and the destination points will rarely move, the system needed to enable static wayfinding is less complex. The downside is that users aren’t able to wayfind dynamically as they move around an indoor space from personal devices such as smartphones.

Indoor navigation offers a plethora of opportunities and benefits that companies of all types can pass on to their visitors or customers. Some of the top use cases that we at Pointr have actively been involved in delivering include:

• Guiding airport visitors to their gate and ensuring they’re alerted in time to get there before their flight boards
• Helping users select multiple items in a retail store and then guiding them through the store in the most efficient manner possible
• Enabling users to wayfind through a complex healthcare facility, selecting routes based on their needs (such as choosing between an elevator and stairs)

What’s truly exciting is that we’re still at the beginning of the indoor wayfinding journey - there are countless future use cases just waiting to be discovered across every industry and type of company you could care to name.

A question we hear regularly is the precise differences between indoor navigation and indoor positioning. Simply put, indoor positioning is all about pinpointing a user’s location within an indoor location, while indoor navigation is the next step, taking that location and combining it with POI and route data to provide the user with a route from their current location to their requested destination. In essence, for this use case, positioning data is the required foundation, with navigation layered on top. Positioning is also known as ‘blue dot’, after the familiar blue shape we’re all familiar with from many navigation and mapping applications.

An exception here is static wayfinding, which, as explained above, doesn’t rely on positioning data as it uses as its basis the idea that the user is searching from a fixed location, such as a kiosk, and therefore doesn’t require live positioning data to function.