Indoor Positioning, Nokia’s mind-bending system to guide you around inside buildings where traditional GPS is unavailable, is due to launch this year. It’s clever, has millions of uses, and is finally becoming reality!
First unveiled last year, Indoor Positioning uses wireless networks and clever mobile mapping to figure out a phone’s location within an enclosed space. Then it can guide the phone’s owner to a position, even if there’s no GPS signal available.
It’s designed to help users find their seats in sports stadiums, find parked cars, or even track down specific stores in malls and shopping centres.
But it doesn’t stop there. Nokia’s already trialling it in 40 of its own buildings, and has begun to map public places too. |t has the potential to be more useful than GPS on a day to day basis, helping workers to find empty meeting rooms, or other facilities such as printers, as well as guiding shoppers to specific products on supermarket shelves.
A commercial trial will launch later this year at a shopping mall in Helsinki. Nokia wants to figure out how it could help businesses boost revenues too. The best news, however, is that it’s on the cards for inclusion in Nokia Beta Labs, meaning we could all be navigating indoors soon!
TBC | £TBC | Nokia (via Nokia Conversations)
