The past year or so has put a bright spotlight on indoor positioning and navigation. The majority of mobile data activity takes place inside, and service providers are keen to deliver services based on the location of those users ‘ whether targeted promotions in malls, augmented reality information about museum exhibits, or a host of other applications. However, GPS has poor indoor penetration and Wi-Fi is an incomplete solution, so there is a race to define new technologies and standards for micro-location.
This has resulted in acquisitions, like Apple’s of WiFiSlam and Cisco’s of ThinkSmart, as well as would-be standards efforts such as the Nokia-led In-Location Alliance, founded in the fall of 2012. The most important recent development came this week from Qualcomm, with the commercial release of its Gimbal proximity beacons, a technology which could challenge Apple’s iBeacon in the iOS world as well as reaching out to Android.
The chip giant’s Retail Solutions subsidiary unveiled the Gimbal beacons, which use low energy Bluetooth Smart technology to pinpoint users within one foot, whether indoors or outdoors. In line with Qualcomm’s strategy of building whole platforms around its hardware, as with AllJoyn (see separate item), it will work with third parties to create a full context-aware platform, including the beacons, the Gimbal Manager back end software, and various applications.
Gimbal, available now for iOS and soon for Android, is a ‘complete package’, said Rocco Fabiano, president of Qualcomm Retail Solutions. ‘Given the affordable pricing of the beacons, retailers and venue operators can install a network for customer engagement that is both more accurate and less expensive than other location-based systems,’ he claimed.
This is just what Apple is promising with iBeacon, which currently tracks iPhone users in Apple Stores to deliver a ‘hyper-personal’ shopping experience. Showcasing the technology in its own high profile shops will help drive adoption by third party retailers, museums, enterprises and other parties looking to differentiate how they engage with customers. But Gimbal provides the ability to reach out to Android users too, and presumably Windows in future, given Qualcomm’s close alliance with Microsoft.
Gimbal, whose proximity beacons cost as little as $5 each in large quantities, is the latest in a series of moves by Qualcomm to provide almost every element of the smartphone or other device (increasingly, in the internet of things, this will mean wearables or non-human gadgets). Not only has it reached into connectivity with the acquisition of Atheros and its Wi-Fi platform, but it is seeking to establish de facto standards in important areas of the internet of things, particularly with AllJoyn and Gimbal.
There are two Gimbal sensors on offer. The smaller Series 10 measures 28 x 40 x 5.6 millimeters while the Series 20 is 95 x 102 x 24 millimeters. Bluetooth is increasingly being adopted as the protocol of choice for such platforms, since GPS is inaccurate when indoors, and NFC is less widely supported in handsets, and requires customer action, such as tapping a phone on a tag, to activate.
‘Use of the platform enables brands to increase sales and drive loyalty by delivering highly relevant communications while those consumers are physically present in their stores and venues. Brands using the Gimbal platform can send customized communications based on interest derived from geofence triggers and proximity triggers, all matched to inferred interests,’ Qualcomm said.
There are start-ups hurrying into the micro-location space too. Most recently, Estimote raised $3.1m in seed funding for its wireless beacon sensors, with backers including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Betaworks and Bessemer Venture Partners. The start-up is piloting its technologies with large US and European retailers, it says.
Beacons are in vogue for enabling proximity marketing, personalized promotions and in-store analytics, and could be extended to support contactless payments ‘ possibly in another blow to NFC, if Bluetooth is used instead.
However, there are many other approaches to indoor tracking and positioning, many based around Wi-Fi, while others use imaging from smartphone cameras, sound waves, magnetics or visible light to locate users.
For instance, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are developing a location-fixing method that uses images from the handset’s camera to calculate position and also orientation. The project leader, Avideh Zakhor, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering, was part of the Berkeley initiative which developed the technology behind 3D Google Earth. His new invention works rather as Google Street View does outside, matching photos taken by mobile devices with
a database of panoramic imagery of a building’s interior.
This could be combined with Wi-Fi tracking for even greater accuracy, and many deployments will rely on multiple technologies, all included by default in smartphones, to locate users. And despite its indoor challenges, GPS and other satellite systems will be part of the picture. Qualcomm recently announced support for China’s positioning satellites, Beidou, in addition to GPS, while Broadcom followed up this week with support for all five major positioning satellite constellations.
It remains to be seen whether Qualcomm looks to establish Gimbal as an industry standard, as it is doing with AllJoyn, but there will certainly be various efforts to drive standards in this important area, even if the supporting protocols will certainly be Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Smart. Nokia moved early when it set up the In-Location Alliance in August 2012 and Qualcomm has taken a prominent role too ‘ it provides the vice chairman of the group, while a Nokia employee is chairman. The body has over 100 members now, with early backers including Sony and Samsung.
The Alliance will use technology based mainly on Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi to improve navigation accuracy and particularly prioritizes low power consumption and ease of use. It expected commercial deployment in devices and applications in later 2013, but that timescale is now looking too short.
In-Location harnesses technology unveiled in 2011 by Nokia’s Silicon Valley research unit. “We want to take what’s been done in navigation outdoors and bring it inside,” said principal radio systems researcher Fabio Belloni at the time. The Finnish firm, which has put location services and its Navteq unit at the heart of its recovery plan, is leading industry work on a location extension protocol to ride on top of Bluetooth LE. This blankets a room with Bluetooth coverage using antenna arrays and LE. These arrays then track all kinds of devices sporting Bluetooth tags and the system uses triangulation techniques to harness that data to create 3D maps of the room and its contents.
However, Apple and Google ‘ whose Maps platforms Nokia challenges with the success of Navteq ‘ are missing from the line-up and are likely to pursue their own indoor location platforms rather than supporting industry alliances. Apple is adding indoor location capabilities to its much-derided mapping system, while Google kicked off its own efforts almost two years ago with the launch of Maps Floor Plan Marker for Android.