What is Indoor Positioning Systems?
Indoor Positioning Systems is a revolutionary technology that enables a multitude of new user experiences. On this page, we’ve gathered the essentials, as well as additional resources for more in-depth information.
What is Indoor Positioning Systems?
The easiest way to describe Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) is that it’s like a GPS for indoor environments.
IPS can be used to locate people or objects inside buildings, typically via a mobile device such as a smart phone or tablet. Although the technology is newer than GPS, services that leverage IPS are quickly gaining traction in places like shopping malls, hospitals, airports and other indoor venues where navigation and other location-based services (LBS) can prove to be indispensable.
How does it work?
IPS technology leverage the internal sensors in smartphones to calculate the device’s indoor position using complex mathematical algorithms. By combining the incoming data from these sensors in a clever way, a very accurate position can be calculated, with little to no latency, resulting in a smooth user experience.
For the best user experience – one that is both accurate and fast, IPS typically relies on three distinct elements: the underlying dynamic positioning system platform, the beacons that broadcast signals that are picked up by the smartphone and then fed to the positioning system, and the apps built on top of the positioning system that add value and make the systems indispensable to users.
Get the full rundown
Want to learn more about indoor positioning systems? Read our whitepaper on everything you need to know.
Three layers of Location-Based Services
An indoor positioning system often acts as a kind of location engine, whirring in the background to pin-point the location of a device. The output of the engine are the coordinates (latitude, longitude and floor number) of said device. Most often, the coordinates need a context in order to be of use. This is why an indoor map is valuable.
The coordinates from the IPS and the indoor map data (such as stored points-of-interest) come together in the application layer – where additional user features are added to create a great experience for the end-user.
Popular use case
Smart Offices
As more and more companies are transitioning to a more agile workplace, with free seating policies and activity-based working, the problem of finding a place to work, or a colleague can be both time and energy consuming for the employees. Office solutions based on indoor positioning enable employees to easier interact with the office environment, for example locating available rooms nearby or meeting up to collaborate with colleagues.
- Find available rooms nearby
- Quickly locate meeting rooms
- Easily meet up with colleagues
- and more!
Popular use case
Shopping Malls
Indoor positioning enables shopping malls to deliver a unique shopping and leisure experience by removing friction, and increasing personalization on all touch-points. By bridging the physical and digital worlds, IPS puts a radically new set of capabilities in the hands of mall operators.
- Personalized in-store experience
- Indoor wayfinding
- Find my car in the parking lot
- Detailed analytics & visitor patterns
- and more!
Proximity beacons and IPS
Proximity solutions, using only beacons to create LBS is slightly different compared to IPS when it comes to features. Proximity solutions rely on detecting when a smartphone is close to a beacon, and then act upon that information to push a notification or in other ways allow the user to interact.
Indoor Positioning Systems, on the other hand, provides a position for the entire area. This means that, for example, the geofences are not limited to a specific beacon, but can be any area and of any size.
More resources
