Nokia working on ‘indoor GPS’ system

Those eye-in-the-sky GPS satellites work a treat out of doors but we happen to spend most our times indoors, surrounded by slabs of concrete and metal which GPS signals can’t penetrate.

But what if you could activate GPS-style navigation and routing on your mobile phone to find your way around a sprawling shopping centre or business park, through an international airport or even within a museum or art gallery?

That’s the rationale behind a Nokia research project named ‘Indoor Positioning’. The service uses proximity and triangulation of the building’s Wi-Fi networks, or even low power data-less wireless beacons, to get a relatively accurate location fix indoors. An appropriate map, accessed from a memory card or downloaded over the 3G network, can then be used in conjunction with the GPS phone’s routing smarts to get you from A to B. The phone not only shows your location on the map but allows you to ‘browse’ the building directory, find points of interest and even share your position with other people.

Nokia is already trialling the service in 40 buildings within its headquarters in Espoo, Finland, and says it has begun to map public places such as the University of Helsinki and Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. A commercial trial is expected to launch by year’s end in Helsinki’s Kamppi shopping mall which will help assess the revenue model for the service, which could include pushing advertisements from nearby stores onto the phone’s screen.