Before long we will easily navigate huge indoor spaces like airports, medical campuses and universities not by looking up at giant wayfinding signs, but by checking a map app on our phones much like we do to drive from point A to point B today.
That’s the prediction of one of the OGs of mapping, James Killick. I talked to James – who prefers Jaded Mapping Curmudgeon to OG – about the complexity and the immense, untapped value of indoor mapping.
James’ experience in mapping spans 40 years, starting in Silicon Valley back in 1985.
“I kind of landed in the mapping business accidentally. I got an engineering degree in computer science back in the UK and landed in Silicon Valley and basically was looking for a job and took the first one I was offered.
“And that company happened to be in the business of creating the world's first vehicle navigation system. And so, I got started working to help pioneer the world's first vehicle navigation system. You’ve probably have heard of the company that it became, which is TomTom, famous for their navigation devices that people used to buy for their cars.”
Other companies James “happened” to work for included a large mapping company called Esri and Apple, where he was one of the key players on the Apple Maps team.
Ever since digital mapping began almost half a century ago it’s been focused on mapping the outdoors for all kinds of different purposes, from our own vehicles, to agriculture, commerce and even the military.
“And so if you look at a digital map today, I like to think of it almost like a Swiss cheese,” James said. “You've got all of the roads, you've got all the features about those outdoor spaces, the buildings, the forests, the parks, the lakes, the rivers.
“But there's these little squares all over the map which look like a Swiss cheese and those squares represent the buildings. And there's no information about what's inside those buildings, how many floors they have, what the floor layout looks like.”
The question becomes why don’t we know what’s in those buildings when that’s where we spend most of our time?
The answer is mapping pros are beginning to figure out how to make indoor mapping more accessible because the value of indoor mapping and the accompanying app technology is finally becoming more and more obvious.
NavvTrack is at the forefront of this revolution in the healthcare industry and is looking at how it can make the same impacts in other types of organizations such as education, retail, and hospitality. Our fleet management software allows companies to:
On the safety and security side, maps can guide people with accessibility challenges, providing them with ‘stepless’ routes or voice navigation. They can guide first responders to the scene of an emergency quickly and assist people in emergencies, allowing consumer mapping apps to flip automatically to “emergency” mode and guide users to the nearest exit.
NavvTrack, along with mapping, keeps devices and the data they contain safe, too. Lost devices can be immediately deactivated, decreasing the risk of data breaches. Emerging technologies like NavvTracks’s location as a service (LaaS) software gives organizations a way to easily integrate its features into their fleet location platform.
And of course all of this increased efficiency, safety and security can lead to significant savings to the organization.
The only information available about what the inside of a building looks like are the original construction drawings, which are not regularly updated.
“What we need is one set of plans that represents the building as it's built today,” James said. “What has to happen then is an evolution of that data of those floor plans into a digital map that can then be easily updated.
“What is needed in the industry is a set of tools that can be made easily accessible to non-technical users, people who do not know about mapping and what is termed in the industry geographic information systems or GIS.”
The good news, according to James, is those tools and the people who can teach others to use them are well into development.
Today everyone expects to be able to navigate the outdoors using their phone. Soon the expectation will be for businesses to have indoor maps of their facilities that make it just as easy to get around indoor spaces.
“And what we will reach, I predict, in the next few years, I'm not quite sure exactly how many years, but it's probably less than 10 and likely kind of in the five-year range, is we'll get to the stage where people will say, ‘What do you mean you don't have an indoor map of your facility? How can you operate without an indoor map?’
“Having a map helps in so many ways, not only to guide people around your buildings and facilities and campuses. Those are the obvious use cases, but it also helps for so many things on top of that. It helps in creating efficient operations. It helps in public safety. And it can help you run your facilities so much more efficiently. That's what's coming.”
You can hear the entire 60-minute podcast here and be sure to take a look at James’ fun and insightful blog, Map Happenings.
