Moving Mapping Technology Indoors
By Scott Kirsner
November 20, 2011
We’ve all had the experience of trying to find a particular product in a big box store apparently devoid of employees, or roaming the aisles of a vast convention center searching for a booth. While GPS displays in our cars or mapping apps on our phones can guide us to the parking lot, once you step inside, you’re in terra incognita.
The next big nut to crack in the navigation business is “indoor positioning,’’ which can solve problems as crucial as helping a fire chief understand where firefighters are within a burning building or as mundane as leading you to an ATM in an unfamiliar airport.
A Cambridge start-up called ByteLight is working on a solution that could be as simple as screwing in a light bulb. The company was spawned by Boston University’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.
November 20, 2011
We’ve all had the experience of trying to find a particular product in a big box store apparently devoid of employees, or roaming the aisles of a vast convention center searching for a booth. While GPS displays in our cars or mapping apps on our phones can guide us to the parking lot, once you step inside, you’re in terra incognita.
The next big nut to crack in the navigation business is “indoor positioning,’’ which can solve problems as crucial as helping a fire chief understand where firefighters are within a burning building or as mundane as leading you to an ATM in an unfamiliar airport.
A Cambridge start-up called ByteLight is working on a solution that could be as simple as screwing in a light bulb. The company was spawned by Boston University’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.
ByteLight hasn’t yet filed patents, so the founders won’t be specific about its technology, but the company is planning to use LED bulbs as a kind of indoor GPS satellite system. At the heart of an LED bulb is a cluster of light-emitting microchips, which can be programmed to flicker in a certain pattern invisible to the naked eye. But that pattern, viewed by the cameras built into most cellphones, would serve as a kind of address.
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