Skip to main content

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise.
But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved.
First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means your phone thinking you're on the wrong aisle of a supermarket or in front of the wrong counter at the food court. Bottom line, the user experience we all want requires more accuracy.
Second is setup and configuration. Most indoor location systems on the market in the past few years have been based on Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE, BLE beacons are fairly cheap, and can be installed throughout a site, every 30-40 meters, to give better performance (or so is believed) than Wi-Fi based systems. But installing this many beacons, and mapping the site to measure the Bluetooth signals at each point in the site, takes a lot of time. This is especially true for big sites.
Third, all the indoor location technologies reaching market recently have come from small start-up companies. Are these companies able to deliver the solutions that the market will want, and maintain them at all the sites at which their technology is being deployed? Can the companies developing the core technology also handle the load of deploying it at sites worldwide, integrating it with existing site applications, and maintaining it?
new report from Grizzly Analytics shows that all of these factors are now solved in a growing number of solutions reaching market. First, accuracies of 2-3 meters are becoming increasingly common in the market. (This was shown in the 2016 Indoor Location Testbed.) Second, several new technologies have reduced considerably the setup and configuration time required, including SLAM, crowdsourcing, infrastructure-free positioning, and more. Third, ongoing M&A is bringing indoor location technologies into the hands of major companies, and the ecosystem is maturing into a form in which one set of companies is delivering technology and another set is deploying it in the market.
All of these factors indicate that 2017 will be the year that indoor location technologies can truly deliver what the market wants. The real explosion may take until 2018, but it is happening.
Want to follow developments in the indoor location area? Sign up here to receive Grizzly Analytics updates, or sign up here to learn about indoor location technologies being exhibited at MWC2017.

Popular posts from this blog

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements  at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

Robot Camera Foreshadows an Era of Location-Aware Electronics

A French company called Move 'N See produces a line of camera robots. Their devices act as a smart tripod, holding a video camera and automatically moving and zooming the camera as people of interest move around a site. The idea is simple but amazingly innovative. Photo selfies are easy to take, but video selfies are next to impossible. How can I video myself playing football or doing gymnastics, without setting the camera so far back as to be useless? Do spectators want to spend an entire sporting event carefully videoing their friend or relative moving around the field? Enter Move 'N See's "personal robot cameramen." Their devices aim, pan and zoom a video camera as one or more people move around an area. The people of interest wear armbands whose locations are tracked, enabling the camera controller to know where to aim the camera. The camera controller also includes enough smarts to adjust the camera smoothly and to capture multiple people evenly. T

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible.  I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving.  This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest.  (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States.  (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .)  So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions.  (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice.   (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what