Nokia creates Indoor Positioning

GPS is fine if you just need directions from your office to a restaurant, but it’s not much help for finding your way around a building. So Nokia has developed a form of indoor GPS.

According to a post of the Finnish firm’s Conversations website, Indoor Positioning could – potentially – help you find places and items indoors, ranging from your seat at a football stadium to a can of beans in the supermarket.

Nokia’s keeping mum about exactly how the technology works, for now, but has said it’s based on wireless networks. The firm’s also said that the technology still needs a scalable solution to make it work and admitted that mapping the guts of each building “is quite a challenge”.

However, not impossible though, because Nokia’s already begun testing Indoor Positioning in over 40 of its own buildings worldwide. It’s even mapped out the innards of several unnamed public buildings, including shopping centres, airports and universities.

Nokia plans to launch a commercial trial of Indoor Positioning later this year at a shopping centre in Helsinki. After that a version for Beta Labs – an Nokia website where users can test and give feedback on potential Nokia applications – could appear.