Indoor Location Systems are coming … via 802.11b?
I am truly impressed with this project out of UCLA. It is addressing a very powerful area of “Indoor Location Services” … allowing a user to locate themselves within a building similar to how GPS can tell you your location outdoors.
Ok … so the technology and techniques are quite different, but the capability of locating yourself within a building – accurately – is now becoming a reality. And how are they doing it? With Orinoco 802.11b access points and cards!
This project is using the statistics available from a Orinoco 802.11b wireless card to create a “map” of locations and the associated access point signals detected at those locations. As a user roams around they can create a “fingerprint” of the signals detected at that location. Later, as they roam around the building, the application can tell where they are by the map that they created.
This is very impressive for a number of reasons, and gets me interested in downloading and running this. I’m downloading it now …