Indoor navigation with the Apple iBeacon framework

Already for a long time companies are trying to tackle the issue of indoor navigation. Already in 2011 I wrote a short post about the upcoming market of indoor navigation and what the people at Nokia research lab where doing is this area. Unfortunately, even though a lot of people do see a market potential in this, there is not much to report in this field and not many really adopted products or protocols have been developed by the industry. Now a new attempt to tackle the issue of indoor navigation is coming into play.

with the release of Apple IOS 7 and the software development kit Apple has introduced the option to the development community to make use of BLE or Bluetooth Low Energy.

"The iBeacon works on Low Energy Bluetooth (BLE), also known as Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart. In a real life scenario it would be more of a location-aware, context-aware, pervasive small wireless sensor beacon that could pinpoint your location in a store: iBeacons could send you notifications of items around you that are on sale or items you may be looking for, and it could enable payments at the point of sale (POS) where you don’t need to remove your wallet or card to make a payment. It could be a possible Near Field Communication (NFC) competitor."

Even though this technology is thought to be a pure Apple technology by some people this is a wrong assumption. iBeacons can be pruchased from a number of companies who develop them and all comply to the same standards. iBeacon is nothing more then a framework where some hardware vendors are developing the hardware beacons for. The most known developer of beacons is estimote however beacons are developed by for for example roximity.

An explanatory video from Estimote can be seen here;

The options of what can be done with the iBeacon solutions are numerous. In the above video some examples are mentioned. For example personalized prizing of items in a store which might differ from person to person based upon their membership of the stores loyalty program. Also an option is to show the number of likes for a product and product reviews.

However a large number of other options and solutions that can be created are possible, think for example indoor navigation on an airfield where someone is directed to the lounge or gate where this person should be. Also a personal plan for someone visiting an exhibition, some exhibitions can be extremely large and navigating the floors and be able to see all the vendors and conference speeches can be extremely difficult.

If you take for example the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in the Moscone center in San Fransisco. It consists out of a number of exhibition floors with a large number of vendors and also it is a conference with a extreme large number of speeches. Getting from conference room to conference room and not missing anything can be hard. Currently visitors can select a track and they are guided and helped by a program. Adding to this program an APP that will help you get to the correct room on time and help you, for example, keep track of where all your colleagues are so you can meet up for coffee between talks would be a great addition. Oracle OpenWorld is just an example and a indoor navigation framework could be offered by the conference center owners as a service to the conference that is using their location.

Upcoming market for indoor navigation

Nokia research labs recently launched a promotion video for a indoor navigation system. To be honest, even do the spread of blogposts and news items, this is not new. indoor navigation systems have been around for some time in both good and bad implementations. Some do work some do unfortunately work not so good. So what the big fuzz should be about is not the fact that Nokia is working on it, which is obviously and would be a suppress if they where not, the fuzz should be about that it is Nokia who is working on it and hopefully will make it to a product.

Reason that it is important that a company like Nokia is working on it is that it will be integrated in the new mobile products and that it most likely will trigger the competitors to also speedup the research on indoor navigation.



The next big thing could be indoor navigation. We have seen a giant step forward in outdoor navigation the past couple of years meanly due to the work done by TomTom, Garmin and Google. Google specially for creating Google maps and the integration into mobile phones and services. Applications, devices and all other kind of stuff is now location aware. Pictures taken with a mobile phone or a camera are now location aware and when you need to find your way around a city you can always rely on the navigation systems you carry in your pocket or which are integrated in your car.

Still a open field for improvement is when you are getting into a building a out of the reach of the GPS satellites. When you walk in an airport and need to find the way to, your gate, the toilet, a coffee corner, a shop, you have to turn to the old fashion of reading signs. When you are in a office you do normally not visit you have to find your way to the restaurant, the printer, the coffee corner, the desk of someone, a specific meeting room. When in a conference center you are always struggling to find your location.

Indoor navigation can make that a lot more easy. Imagine visiting the office of a customer for a project. In the beginning every consultant is struggling to find all kind of information to get started. Where do I find the printer room, where is this person located (and who is it), where can I find that conference room and where to grab a cup of coffee and a snack. This could all be resolved with indoor navigation. However this is also putting some stress on people maintaining the building. They will have to provide this information and specially in environments where people do not own their own desk it can be hard to keep track of who is sitting where.

For all those problems a solution can (and will) be provided in time and I strongly feel that indoor navigation will be the next big thing coming to the market. First as standalone apps created for airports and conference centers at a later stage for office buildings and shopping malls. At some point it will connect with social media networks to be able to share great indoor locations in somewhat the same way as you now see for outdoor locations with services like foursquare and similar services.

One big issue is that for indoor navigation you currently need a infrastructure to be able to do locate your position. You will need points in the building broadcasting a anchor point where for GPS you can make use of the satellites around the planet. This will slowdown the growth however it might be integrated with wifi spots. It would not come as a suppress to me if indoor navigation base stations will be in the future also broadcasting free (or commercial) WiFi.