Bright Ideas In Indoor Location Awareness From Bytelight

Outdoor location awareness, otherwise known as GPS, has become ubiquitous. It started out as a way for the U.S. military to have location awareness and then spread to the rest of the world, literally. Whereas in-car GPS navigation used to be a luxury, it has become commonplace and has spread to smartphones. Between map apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze and augmented reality apps like Wikitude and Augmented Car Finder, GPS is used by most smartphone users. However, indoor location awareness is less common because of the technology problems.

While GPS may work on upper floors of a building or in a single-story building, it doesn’t work in a lot of indoor locations because the satellite signal from GPS can’t penetrate into the structure. A number of different companies are working on solutions to this problem. But what exactly is the problem? Why do we need indoor location awareness? Turn-by-turn directions inside a mall aren’t usually necessary, because enough malls have maps to help you navigate. Same for most large indoor complexes. So, what is the problem here? I recently had the opportunity to hear Marc Check, the Director of Information and Interactive Technology at Boston’s Museum of Science (MOS), explain the take on tying targeted digital content to specific locations.

Being a native Bostonian, I have been a lifelong fan of the MOS, so it’s a real treat to hear from Check about what his vision is for the future of technology at the museum and to get a sneak peek at some of the exciting upcoming exhibits planned for the museum. What piques my interest during his talk though is his vision for indoor location awareness and how the museum could use this new technology. A few days after the event, I spoke to Check and Dan Ryan, co-founder and CEO of ByteLight. ByteLight, a Cambridge-based startup founded by two Boston University graduates, is developing proprietary software that can map the inside of buildings using only LED lighting to transmit location information. With the trend in many buildings around the world toward replacing florescent lights with LEDs, using LEDs to broadcast location information could change how people interact with trade shows and expos, shopping malls, and even airports. Both Check and Ryan have their own ideas on the importance and the opportunity of indoor location awareness. Check’s ideas are about what can indoor location awareness do for the museum while Ryan’s thoughts are more about how businesses, and especially retail stores, can take advantage of indoor location awareness.

Check’s vision consists of three areas. The first is being able to deliver a virtual layer of information and experience. You walk up to an exhibit cabinet filled with items and there’s only so much wall space to deliver information. A mobile device and location awareness would allow curators to give as much information as a visitor might want to have. The museum uses QR codes in some places to deliver this, but it views the codes as a stopgap measure until something better comes along. MOS also uses augmented reality with invisible image markers to deliver an enhanced experience with the dinosaur exhibit, but Check believes this could be better in the future with indoor location awareness. Most museums doing this now are providing more content, more label copy. That’s valuable in some cases, but the Museum of Science wants to deliver more than just text, like videos and interactive features. Check imagines people playing games or activities on mobile devices connected to the exhibit; activities that are experiential.

However, Check’s vision is looking at this from an interpretive point of view. How do we connect disparate nodes of information within the museum, “an interconnected web of things”, so the visitor can explore them based on their own interests? An example of this is that the museum might have have an exhibit on motorcycle and automobile engines. With indoor location awareness, a smartphone will know that you are looking at this exhibit. The app can then recommend that you also look at an exhibit on the other side of the museum about alternative energy sources or more information on the museum’s use of alternative energy.

Another application of this is also crowdsourcing from visitors by allowing, for example, the parent of a preschooler to create a list of exhibits to visit that would interest young children. The museum can collate this crowdsourced information and make it available to all visitors.

When people visit a new city, they’re intimately tied to their smartphone maps or GPS device to help them get around, especially in a city like Boston where the street layout was seemingly designed by wandering cows. Museums aren’t always the easiest places to navigate and the Museum of Science is no exception. MOS is currently in a five year plan to enhance and upgrade the museum, so things are constantly moving. The museum has signs telling visitors where to find things that aren’t where they used to be. This is similar to driving around Boston where there’s constantly signs telling you how to get around construction. With this in mind, the second part of Check’s vision is wayfinding and customer relations. The museum needs a “flexible dynamic accurate way of allowing people a way to find the things they need to find within our own building.” Indoor location awareness plays a big part in this. There is this pressing need to help people find what they’re looking for but also a marketing or point-of-presence sales aspect also. A visitor is sitting in the Riverview Cafe and an app can popup and say an Imax film is starting next door in the Mugar Omni Theater in 20 minutes. “Do you want to watch a trailer and buy tickets?” You can extrapolate this out and from a business point of view, you can up interest in different areas of the museum and increase sales of tickets to all of the ancillary venues.

Combining the first and second ideas into one big vision, and this is where Check becomes the most excited, is what if the museum can’t only deliver content to people and their own themed wayfinding (e.g. the list of exhibits for preschoolers above) throughout the museum but can also tie that to other types of things they might be interested in. If the app sees someone is walking around the museum and looking at natural sciences and live animals, it might suggest an upcoming Imax film on polar bears or a live animal demonstration in 20 minutes, even offering walking directions to get there.