Nowadays more and more handsets have a GPS receiver, but these can be used only for outdoors navigation, although people spend 90 percent of their time inside all kinds of buildings. The idea of indoor navigation is not completely new, as there are many such huge buildings, shopping centers or even underground tunnels that make getting around hard. Kimmo Kalliola, leader of the indoor navigation project has revealed new details about the solution announced last year. The aim of indoors navigation is of course not to help us get around at home in the dark, but to help solve such problems like looking up a shop in a larger center, to find our car inside a full parking house or to get to a seat in a stadium, but it can even be used for finding a product inside a warehouse. Besides these it might come in handy at a workplace to find the printer or an empty conference room.
The base for indoors navigation are wireless networks, but of course developing a scalable, easy-to-introduce solution is a much greater challenge. Mapping the buildings is no easy task either, although users of the service might be a great help in this, their active participation might be the key to the service's success. Nokis is currently testing indoors navigation in forty buildings around the world and mapping of the first airports, shopping centers and universities has also started. Nokia will soon involve users in testing, who will be able to try the new service in a shopping center in Helsinki, after that the first version of the indoors navigation software becoming available on the Nokia Beta Labs site.
Translated by Szaszati
