Augmented Reality and Indoor Navigation: A Look into Evolved Mapping Apps

Most large buildings have indoor map billboards or provide visitors with a site map of the building to help them navigate to the place they want to visit. Even then, that’s not user-friendly, so organisations started establishing an indoor navigation system.

Since the invention of PCs, human lives have been changing every day. It might feel absurd if you think of a day without digital mediums. Technology and gadgets have made our everyday life easier. A mobile phone controls almost everything in our day-to-day life, from tracking time, ordering food, and shopping to managing schedules and banking. One such important task in life that was made simple with technology is navigation.

When GPS was invented, navigation changed tremendously. It has changed the way how everything travels and moves around. After that, when GPS navigation/map was integrated with mobile phones, its use cases grew rapidly. Mobile navigation always provides accurate information, such as finding the shortest route, nearby restaurants, etc.

After the integration of Augmented Reality into digital maps, navigation got simplified. While GPS helps you find certain location outdoors, AR helps with indoor navigation. As we come across huge buildings like government offices, banks, shopping malls, parks, warehouses, hospitals, corporate offices, airports, manufacturing houses etc., indoor navigation has become a significant need. Thus, AR became the best technological solution to provide accurate indoor directions.

In recent times, DMG has had many clients who wanted to leverage extended reality to provide an enriched user experience to their audience/users. We have had mid-level to large companies who were keen to explore indoor navigation and believed it to be a potential tool to interact with users, collect data and analyse them.

So AR indoor navigation is not all about wayfinding; it can be a wholesome business growth tool! This article will take you through what exactly is AR-based indoor mapping, how it works and how businesses can leverage them.

Indoor mapping uses various technologies that help users visualise indoor spaces, objects, or persons and navigate users to reach them. Indoor navigation can be a simple 2D floor map or complete computer-generated 3D simulations that recreate the real-world indoor spaces. In most cases, it can be accessed with a web browser or apps.

Here, in the video, you can see a grocery store enabled with an AR indoor navigation system that uses visual markers and navigate the shoppers to whichever product or grocery section the shopper has indicated. Instead of going rounds in search of products, shoppers will quickly identify the items needed to be purchased. It also saves customers time and gives them an impressive AR experience.

Most of our customers who don’t have a direct relationship or communication with the customers come with a notion that they can’t leverage AR indoor navigation in their businesses. You can integrate an indoor navigation system and give your employees an immersive experience. You can add the calendar, schedules, games, friend finder and a scoreboard to your navigation app. This will help you analyse the working style of your employees too.

Suppose you are also doubtful about how your business can leverage AR indoor navigation for its growth. In that case, we can guide you to figure it out and implement an integrated AR indoor navigation solution.

AR-based indoor navigation uses AR technology and provides directions on the screen overlaid on the top of the real environments that can be seen through the device’s camera, like smartphones.

There are two significant parts to AR-based indoor navigation – one being the actual navigation and localisation and the next being the AR directions such as arrows, markers, text and other symbols on the screen.

AR-based indoor navigation guides users to navigate easily through complex buildings without using physical 2D maps or help desks. Thus, AR-based indoor navigation helps businesses provide their users with an immersive user experience.

There are various types of technologies available for indoor navigation. Some of the common ones used by the business organisations are:

When a client comes in with a request to build an indoor navigation system, the DMG team will first study and analyse the building that needs the navigation system. After that, seeing the size of the building and the number of people/objects it encounters every day, we will suggest the technology that can be the best solution for the client’s requirements.

Once the technology is approved, we will work on the navigation and localisation. The next step will be defining the images, texts, markers and other symbols used for AR directions. We will start building the personalised indoor navigation app when both are ready.

The Dubai Mall, one of the biggest malls in the world, with an annual number of visitors of 80 million people, have an indoor navigation system that can navigate the visitors throughout the 12.1 million square foot complex. The Dubai mall’s indoor navigation system can be accessed through its official app. It navigates visitors to all the major shopping and entertainment destinations and provides information on retail offers and friend finder features.

Choosing the perfect indoor navigation system is highly dependent on your consultant, who is building the system for you. When DMG takes a client on board for making indoor navigation, our primary aim would be to deliver the best solution that will give a significant user experience cost-effectively. So when you choose your partner to build the indoor navigation system, be sure what technology they used earlier to build the navigation systems and check on its accuracy and cost-efficiency.