I just don't see indoor navigation as a huge problem to be solved. And this seems a phenomenally complicated solution to a small problem.
GPS works because outside is an enormous, unfamiliar place with tens of billions of destinations. Inside is small, relatively familiar, and even a large building has, at most, hundreds of destinations.
Just watching the demo, it's super cool and super intelligent. But it doesn't look like it can do direction - it can only tell direction after you've walked a certain distance. How will it cope with large magnetic things that move - eg Forklift trucks, vehicles, trolleys, wire cages etc.
I don't buy it. Ikea is the only potential place I could see this being of use, and there's no way anyone's going to bake in an extra sensor to a smartphone on the offchance. Look how slow adoption NFC has seen and that's a MASSIVE problem with multiple applications and a clear financial incentive.
I suppose you don't live in a dense city with a lot of indoors and underground infrastructure. In some places you easily spend half a mile indoors between underground train platforms or to the exit on the surface, or in walkways inside and in between buildings where there's no reliable signal. Other times it's simply because part of the commute goes through tunnels or the entire trip is underground. This really breaks a lot of useful tools, for example location based alerts or simply using navigation to get to the correct exit of a station (office, mall, etc.) which if you get it wrong can mean an extra mile of walking.
Yep, location-based alerts such as when you have reminders using 'geofencing' (e.g. remind me to xyz when I leave work) -- they could fire as you leave your actual office, instead of after you drive away (which is often not as helpful).
We build indoor navigation systems for hospitals in Canada and it is indeed a huge problem. The larger institutions are like a maze with wings and additions added over the course of decades. Making a route to your appointment though 3 buildings, up 2 elevators, and over a wing is easy. Helping you actually stay on the route as you follow it is not. If this new tech is cheaper to deploy than dozens, if not hundreds, of wifi beacons then it could be a real win.
Sorry, your assumptions are way off. Indoor mapping and specifically location aware indoor mapping is huge.
We're trying to solve exactly this problem in London, why you may ask? When you have millions of commuters using your network each day (Underground) and many of your stations are at 100% capacity then your only option is to manage the flow of passengers more efficiently.
You've also missed a key problem, accessibility. The sheer volume of tourists, elderly or parents with prams getting onto a carriage thats inefficient to their travel results in exacerbating delays on platforms, this example(and other technologies) is a possible way to reduce those problems.
Working for a medium size manufacturing plant that wants to get a handle on movement of goods and people, I can tell you that this technology would be a game changer. We can't afford to use RFID and 1m accuracy of Wifi positioning is not worth the hassle. This site says they can get .2m accuracy, no extra infrastructure required, we will be watching this technology very closely. It is a lot easier to stick an iPod touch in someone's pocket than install RFID infrastructure.
I am talking about movement of goods within a single warehouse. We could stick an iPod touch on the bottom of a pallet/box for a couple days. If the tech takes off maybe someone will invent a ruggedized tiny piece of hardware that just has the compass and wifi data transmission built in.
What extra sensor? The article talks about them using the compasses that smartphones already have.
And you're wrong, it's a big market. Every large store in the world wants customers to easily find things. Big-box retail has to be over $1 trillion in annual revenue; Walmart alone does upwards of $400 billion a year. Something that slightly increases purchases or customer satisfaction can have a giant impact.
Those places employ millions of people; just letting their own employees find things easily could save a lot of labor time. Ditto for letting employees do something more productive than helping people find things that their phones could lead them to.
I'm wrong about the sensor, fair point. Though low-level access to its data will presumably need to be available through the device API.
But anyway... Stores actually put a lot of effort into spreading the essentials around, and making you walk as far as possible to find things. It's in their interests that you are lost and browsing all the other stuff that you could be buying, instead of just grabbing that milk and going.
It's in their interest that you walk past things you might need to trigger spontaneous purchases, I agree. But it's not so clear to me that they really want you wandering and frustrated. Note that most stores label aisles clearly, keep things in the same place for long periods, and often provide ways to find things yourself (staff, phones, mobile apps, paper maps).
I looked into indoor navigation-related stuff when I was planning my senior project in college. There seems to be a problem on some university campuses where freshmen, visitors, etc. get lost easily because buildings get merged with other buildings and the university can't be bothered to renumber rooms.
I don't think indoor navigation is as big as NFC, but I can see people making at least a little bit of money at colleges (and, as someone else pointed out below, mass transit situations)
Indoor navigation is a huge problem for the blind and visually impaired as well. Currently, I'm working in research on an RFID based location sensing system. It works, but requires infrastructure to be installed, so any system using just a magnetometer/inertial system would be very useful.
I'd like to use some indoor navigation at large airports and subway. And it's a killer feature for exploring underground mines and caves, urban explorers will love it :)
Fortunately there are others with more imagination.
If all you can think of is Ikea, maybe hold off commenting until (you've actually read the article) others have opened your mind to more possibilities.
GPS works because outside is an enormous, unfamiliar place with tens of billions of destinations. Inside is small, relatively familiar, and even a large building has, at most, hundreds of destinations.
Just watching the demo, it's super cool and super intelligent. But it doesn't look like it can do direction - it can only tell direction after you've walked a certain distance. How will it cope with large magnetic things that move - eg Forklift trucks, vehicles, trolleys, wire cages etc.
I don't buy it. Ikea is the only potential place I could see this being of use, and there's no way anyone's going to bake in an extra sensor to a smartphone on the offchance. Look how slow adoption NFC has seen and that's a MASSIVE problem with multiple applications and a clear financial incentive.