To @AndrewHartAR: “Our app is shit and we know it’s shit”.
My life changed forever when a senior exec from one of the world’s largest retailers messaged me on Twitter. This was back in 2017. My outdoor AR navigation demos had just gone viral, and my new open-source project for Apple had elevated me to be the top trending iOS developer on GitHub. Every developer meet-up I went to, everyone now seemed to know who I was. I was on top of the world.
I agreed to meet the exec for coffee in London, and she told me a story that would change the course of my life. One which I’d hear thousands of times over the next 8 years, from other businesses facing the same challenge. And one which would lead to a breakthrough that could improve the lives of a billion people.
“We’re building this new version of our app — this time it won’t be shit. But there’s one big thing we want to add, and we haven’t figured out a way.”
They wanted to bring indoor maps and navigation to their retail stores, so customers could find what they’re looking for, and they could pop up relevant promotions along the way. It turns out that this doesn’t just apply to retail. Every office, university campus, events venue, hotel, airport, warehouse, factory — basically everywhere indoors have some need to navigate people around, provide relevant information, and improve efficiency.
I assumed this was a solved problem. No. They do have maps on their app, and on their informational kiosks, but those often take months to update so are always out of date. They also aren’t able to navigate you, like GPS in a car, because GPS doesn’t work indoors. They can’t provide the blue dot. They can ask the user to manually update the route as they go, but maps are complicated and the experience is confusing.
I did know something about maps and location already — the first startup I worked at built an early version of Pokemon Go. I’d been tasked with generating the gamified maps, and populating the monsters and rewards. So I knew a bit about maps, coordinates and GPS — and monster training. But indoor navigation was new to me.
“We’ve tried everything out there. Nothing works.”
So I left that meeting and started digging in. Why has this indoor navigation problem not been solved? Over the years, I’ve slowly become an expert in this, so let me explain. It can essentially be broken down into three problems that all intertwine: indoor maps, indoor navigation, indoor location.
Indoor maps and navigation are relatively easy problems. With good mapping tools, it’s very possible to build a digital map and keep it up to date. Indoor navigation is a mix of classic Computer Science algorithms - like A* pathfinding, and “Travelling Salesperson”.
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