We need it to scale better to work in very large spaces. We’ve been hearing that feedback a lot since we launched Indoor Location SDK back in 2014. No wonder: airports, shopping malls, hospitals, these are all huge locations and very challenging settings for indoor positioning technology. That’s why we’re so excited to announce an update to the Estimote Indoor Location SDK that not only easily scales to spaces of any size, but also does so in an incredibly efficient manner.
You can try it now by switching on the new Indoor Light positioning mode in settings.
What’s new?
So far Indoor Location only allowed for placing beacons along a location’s perimeter. This severely limited positioning performance in larger spaces. With the latest version of the app and SDK that’s no longer an issue. Now you can also add beacons inside the location and scale it to any size. To achieve that, we put much more focus on calculations based on beacons’ signals than on other factors used in the previous version of the algorithm. It comes with the added benefit of improved efficiency. Indoor Location is now lighter on CPU and battery usage. And that’s still not all! The Light mode also adds support for iPod and iPad, something museums and galleries in particular were asking for.
The approach we’ve taken requires some trade-offs. With positioning based mostly on beacons, we had to sacrifice the responsiveness of the original positioning mode. In practice, instead of a user’s avatar moving fluidly around the map, you will see it snapping between positions. So rather than saying the user is in this exact point, it tells you: the user is somewhere around here. In other words, you get improved stability but with less responsiveness. With beacons placed every 6 meters, the accuracy is 3 meters on average.
That’s why switching to the new positioning mode is optional while we’re working on bringing the same scalability and efficiency to the standard, more responsive positioning. The new mode is called Indoor Light and you can easily enable it for every location. Yes, it’s backward compatible with existing locations.
If you’re wondering whether original Indoor Location or Indoor Light is the best choice for your use case… try both: switching between them is pretty easy and we explain it below. But the rule of thumb is: the larger the space, the more important stability becomes. Indoor Light really starts to shine in locations bigger than 250 square meters. Our friends from Cuseum, who had early access to the beta version, can confirm that:
I recently tested the Indoor Light SDK in both a small (30'x30’) and larger space (50'x50’). The calibration was definitely the smoothest I’ve seen for indoor location with iBeacons. Additionally, the fact that we can get extended battery life with general location within a space is very exciting. I look forward to using Indoor Light more in the near future and introducing this to our museum and cultural partners!
said Zach Reiner, Product Lead at Cuseum.
Turn it on
You just need to open the Indoor Location app and tap on user profile icon in the top right corner. Then switch the navigation mode to Light. You can also do it with the SDK. The positioning mode is independent from building the location, so you can always switch to see what fits you best. Note: right now to create a location with beacons in the middle, you need to do it the SDK’s LocationBuilder. In case you haven’t used it yet, here’s a guide.
Go ahead and give Indoor Light a go. And don’t forget to tell us how you like it on the forums, on Twitter, and via email!
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote