Mapping Out Interiors

Sure, that’s your office cubicle. Your corner store. Maybe even the layout of your furniture in your living room. But that doesn’t mean that soon we won’t all be peering at it, too.

That is because two trends, location technology and crowdsourcing, may soon converge. If they do, our indoor lives will be mapped much as street addresses are today, challenging both conventional business practices and human intimacy.

A Finnish company called IndoorAtlas has figured out that all buildings have a unique magnetic “fingerprint” — and has solved how to use that to determine locations inside a structure to within six feet. That is enough to take a consumer to a product in a crowded supermarket, or figure out the location of, say, a half-dozen workers in a building full of them. It’s also much better than cell phone towers can do.

Read more via the New York Times Bits Blog

crowdsourcing facility management interior mapping location