WifiSLAM: Indoor location/positional tracking

[mahler]

Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM

Apple has acquired indoor-GPS company WifiSLAM, a sign that the war over indoor mobile location services is heating up.

Apple paid around $20 million for the Silicon Valley-based company, according to a person familiar with the matter who said the deal closed recently.

An Apple spokesman confirmed the deal saying the company “buys smaller technology companies from time to time” and generally doesn’t discuss its plans. He declined to comment further. WifiSLAM could not immediately be reached for comment.

The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps. The company has a handful of employees, and its co-founders include former Google software engineering intern Joseph Huang.

The move comes as Apple continues to build its arsenal against Google in mapping. It debuted its own mapping service last year to poor reviews and user complaints about inaccurate data. Apple chief executive Tim Cook apologized for the quality of the product, and Apple has continued to improve it.

Google already offers indoor mapping in certain locations like airports, shopping centers and sports venues.

WifiSLAM has raised an unknown amount of money from a handful of angel investors including Google employee Don Dodge, according to investor site AngelList.

Interesting news:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/23/ ... -wifislam/

This is "WIFI assisted GPS localisation" but I'm not sure about the precision, accuracy and latency possible with this technology.

[geekmaster]

This is "WIFI assisted GPS localisation" but I'm not sure about the precision, accuracy and latency possible with this technology.

There is a plug-in software instrument for Windows 7, that uses wifi signals, matched against local wifi data gathered by Google Maps when they did street view. It can find my house to within about 100 feet, without GPS (but needs wifi to access the Google servers). By mapping wifi SSID and signal strength within a building, you should be able to triangulate your position quite well, after training the database for your device locations (which it can auto-learn if you move around with your portable device). It can use the signal strength of all the wireless routers it can see (including those of your neighbors). When I run InSSIDer on my windows laptop, it sees a differenc collection of SSIDs depending on what part of the house I am in. A little custom mapping software and it should work okay.

But beware, wifi signals are absorbed by water (the main ingredient of your body), and can also be blocked and reflected by metal, so accuracy may be sporadic. Scattering extra wifi routers around the house should help the accuracy (such as surrounding your VR "play area" with them (using different SSIDs and/or MAC addresses, depending on software).