Mapping Inside Spaces

By Jake • March 23rd, 2011 • 12 Comments

A few years ago when we were enhancing Connect, we tried to get our hands on all the office maps for all the Oracle offices around the World.

The idea was that simply providing a person’s office number on a profile wasn’t good enough, since most office numbers aren’t easily understandable without some context or at all.

We wanted to go one better and show the exact space on an indoor map. That would have been useful for a company with hundreds of offices in cities all over the place, but alas, we never were able to get the floorplans in a format we could use.

The idea of mapping inside spaces has merit, especially big spaces with lots of books, like say Powell’s City of Books here in Portland.

With your iPhone and Meridian, getting lost in Powell’s Books may be a thing of the past « Silicon Florist

Semi-related note, John Yopp (@johnyopp) and I were brainstorming AR (Update: Augmented Reality) apps that would provide not indoor maps for big warehouses and retail stores, but also provide stock and pricing information.

Lots of room to innovate by applying location and AR to business.


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  • http://twitter.com/turoczy Rick Turoczy

    While I’m sure retail is their sweet spot, I could totally see this being applicable in large corporate environments. Great idea.

  • http://twitter.com/nfarina Nick Farina

    One of our demo locations in Meridian we show to folks is a large corporate campus mapped out – you can get directions to a particular cubicle. The office floorplans are just map images that we draw our routing graphs on top of.

  • http://www.openaffairs.tv Nate DiNiro

    Let’s not forget healthcare settings. Location information in hospitals can alter life or death circumstances and provide access the right resource in the right place at the right time. Most of the indoor mapping systems in healthcare today revolve around locating beds and assets. However having the closes location of a crash cart, or locating the closest dispensary for a med needed in an emergency situation would have significant value.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    AR has some awesome potential for businesses, Skynet stuff.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Very cool stuff, I would test it out at Powell’s, but sadly, I’m lost for now with my Android ;)

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Absolutely, the work on healthcare/location apps has begun (e.g. http://thesocialmedic.net/2011/03/san-francisco-fire-begins-firedepartment-app-development/) so why not indoor use cases too? Good stuff.

  • David Dorf

    Jake, I studied this a bit back in May. See http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/2010/05/going_inside_the_store.html
    Lots of promise.

  • http://blogs.oracle.com/userassistance/ uvox

    Has obvious uses in disaster situations too, working through large buildings, perhaps even to find individuals themselves by RFID, though obviously the survivability of the technology itself is required (we had a post on that).

    I can see a role for field-service technicians too operating in large plants to locate points that need servicing and so on and to get to them quickly. I worked in the huge Guinness brewery in Dublin years ago. It was like being in a small city, full of underground passages, tunnels, buildings called No 1, No 2, etc. Coulda used a map on phone…

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Yeah, I know John has been in your ear about it :) Good ideas there.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Mmmm, Guinness.

    Not sure RFID has enough range, but that’s an interesting idea. It sounds like Nick and Spotlight Mobile (commented below) are doing exactly what big campuses and breweries need.

  • http://twitter.com/oraclenerd oraclenerd

    hmmm…had to look up AR: http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=define%3A+AR&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1

    That didn’t give me anything useful. AR apps did.

    I’m not an early (enough) adopter.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Good point, added the definition to clarify.