The holy grail of contextual computing is accurate and scalable indoor location. We’ve been on the quest to bring it to you for over a year already and are excited to announce another milestone: new version of our Indoor Location app with vastly improved reliability and a way to map much larger and more complex locations than ever before.
Try the new app today. It’s already available in the App Store.
Location, location, indoor location
Many of us couldn’t imagine everyday life without Google Maps, Uber, or Foursquare. Such location-based services proliferated only because accurate mapping outdoors became possible thanks to GPS, satellite imager, and location frameworks natively built into iOS and Android. But satellite imagery doesn’t cut it for retail stores, airports, hospitals, and other indoor spaces - and so the potential for hyperlocal, context-aware technology remains enormous.
Indoor location is notoriously hard. First, you need to come up with a way to create the map. Are you going to use Bluetooth beacons? Optical scanning? Digitized floorplans? Once you’ve made your decision on a preferred method, you need technical personnel to actually take care of the mapping. Done? Cool, now you can figure out how to convert your map to a machine-friendly format that will also play well within the framework with which you’re developing.
Or, you can spend five minutes using the Estimote Indoor Location app.
Today’s release features a brand-new, robust mapping process. We made it more stable, more accurate, and easier to complete. It also supports locations with complex shapes up to hundreds of square meters in size. We’re particularly excited about that last improvement, as support for bigger spaces was the most popular request from our developer community. The new app will first ask you to simply walk around your location to take some initial measurements. Then it will suggest the number of beacons you’ll need for best performance, along with instructions on proper placement. After that you should attach the beacons to your walls and take another walk for the Indoor Location app to save their exact position. Voila, you’re done! The whole process shouldn’t take more than few minutes.
Every location is automatically saved in Estimote Cloud, where you can adjust the shape and size by dragging and dropping the corners. In other words: don’t worry if the map doesn’t look perfect, you can fine-tune the dimensions anytime. And finally, each saved location is ready to work with Estimote Indoor Location SDK. You can immediately start working on putting it in your app.
But will it scale?
We know what you’re thinking. What if I have 100 locations to map? Do I have to run laps around each of them? And what if my location is not hundreds, but thousands, or tens of thousands of square meters? In other words: will it scale?
First things first: Indoor Location app is not the only mapping tool for Estimote Beacons. The Estimote Indoor Location SDK comes with a handy class called LocationBuilder. With LocationBuilder you can create a location of any shape and size programmatically. Just provide the X/Y coordinates for location corners and beacon placement, and you’re done. So if you believe a programmatic approach will scale better, no worries, we’ve got you covered.
When it comes to mapping XXL locations, we’re working on that as well. Look out for updates from Estimote in the weeks ahead, because other big announcements regarding Indoor Location are coming soon. Stay tuned and let us know what you think about the new Indoor Location app on Twitter or drop us a line to share your thoughts.
And don’t forget to test the new app!
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote