Friday’s Food for Thought: Indoor Mapping

As indoor mapping capabilities become more sophisticated, the days of prevalent indoor navigation is quickly approaching.

Apple recently launched an indoor positioning app in the iTunes store, reports Mashable. Called Indoor Survey, Apple encourages business owners to use the map to pinpoint their businesses for inclusion in Apple Maps. Users can even go far as mapping their house.

Google is also making headway in indoor mapping with a new device called The Cartographer. Unveiled in September 2014, The Cartographer is worn as a rucksack by Google employees and is designed to create maps of indoor locations, reports CityMetric. Google has already pinpointed many indoor locations around the world for inclusion on Google Maps, including airports, museums, shopping malls, convention centers, sports venues, and landmarks.

According to MIT Technology Review, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, built an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that creates 3D map models as it flies through indoor areas. Named the AscTec Firefly, the UAV is a small quadcopter weighing 1.6 kilograms and equipped with a stereo camera and sensors that report velocity, orientation, and gravitational forces.

Check out trajectory’s Q4 2015 article “Inside Game” to learn more about indoor wayfinding.

Photo Credit: Apple