Don’t have a playground nearby? No backyard? Not even a tree that you can attach a tire and rope to? Well, that’s downright sad, but dry those eyes. This door frame swing is here to help. The indoor door frame swing can be set up on most door frames to give your kid hours of fun. I’m not sure how safe it is, but they say it holds “in excess of 100 lbs.” Your kid may end up on the floor a few times, but that’s a small price to pay for bringing the playground indoors, right?
It will cost you $55.99(USD) from Amazon. Just watch it as you walk around your home. You kid might slam into you and knock you down the stairs on his upswing.
Interior navigation with Google Maps for Android has usually been the province of only a handful of regions at best. But what about Provence? While the deal isn’t all-encompassing, Google is now serving indoor maps for popular locations throughout France. Coverage starts with the major airports in Paris and Lyon, extending to include major nationwide stores like Carrefour and FNAC, shopping centers like the Carrousel du Louvre and museums like La Géode. All told, over 50 venues have signed onboard and should be enough for those moments when you’re rushing to catch a connecting flight at Orly… or just want to find the salad dressings in aisle three.
As you probably already know, GPS technology is pretty much useless once you’re inside of a building, so companies are working on ways to provide directional and navigational information while indoors. One very promising technology has been demonstrated by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).
The technology uses visible light communication (VLC), pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) and map matching algorithms to determine the location and direction an individual is facing while indoors. In this demonstration video, we see a subject walking through a mall, and a 3D model of the same location closely replicating the individual’s location and direction.
It doesn’t look like it’s accurate down to the inch, but it’s pretty impressive compared to traditional GPS systems. It’s hard to tell or if the location sensors are placed throughout the building or carried by the individual, but it looks like all he’s carrying is a tablet to control the application, and it’s possible that the sensors are only in the tablet itself. It seems to me that the tablet has an application with a pre-rendered map onboard, and it’s using the tablet’s camera and the lights throughout the space to determine its relative position. Guess it wouldn’t work in the dark then.
It’s not clear if or when this technology will make its way into our lives, but it sure would be cool to be able to find your way around malls, office buildings and indoor stadiums so you can find your way around and your friends can locate you too.
After covering more than 23 million miles of the world’s roadways, Nokia has focused on expanding its interior mapping footprint. Since its launch during CTIA 2011, the company’s Destination Maps service has grown to cover a total of 4,605 different venues in 38 countries, including airports, department stores, shopping malls and transit hubs. As you can see in the infographic above, the majority of those locations are in North America, with a total of 2,595 mapped on the continent, followed by 1,778 in EMEA, 225 in the Asia Pacific region and just seven in Latin America — that’s 235 million square feet in all. Nokia also promises much more to come in the future, with hints identifying amusement parks and stadiums as possible beneficiaries. The company also reiterated its recent partnership with Bing, adding that Nokia Maps will have access to Destination Maps in the not-so-distant future as well. You’ll find a few more details at the source link below, and while we don’t have precise predictions to share, you can rest easy knowing that Nokia’s indoor effort is far from complete.
Interior navigation is only just coming into its own, but IndoorAtlas has developed a technology that could make it just as natural as breathing — or at least, firing up a smartphone’s mapping software. Developed by a team at Finland’s University of Oulu, the method relies on identifying the unique geomagnetic field of every location on Earth to get positioning through a mobile device. It’s not just accurate, to less than 6.6 feet, but can work without help from wireless signals and at depths that would scare off mere mortal technologies: IndoorAtlas has already conducted tests in a mine 4,593 feet deep. Geomagnetic location-finding is already available through an Android API, with hints of more platforms in the future. It will still need some tender loving care from app developers before we’re using our smartphones to navigate through the grocery store as well as IndoorAtlas does in a video after the break.
There’s no shortage of navigation outdoors, and even a little bit of help indoors, but there’s been precious little aid for the blind indoors — leaving them little choice but to move cautiously or get outside help. Fujitsu and Japan’s NICT have crafted a system that gives the sightless a greater level of autonomy inside through ultrawideband-based impulse radio. A grid of UWB radios positioned around a room gauge the distances between each other and transmit the data to a PC, which then talks to the traveler’s Android phone. The device then gives spoken directions based on a 12-o’clock system and far subtler distances than GPS can manage: the positioning is accurate to within a foot. While the indoors navigation is only just getting a demo this week, it’s already being refined to detect objects in the room as well as to help even the fully sighted. If Fujitsu and NICT have their way, buildings ranging from hospitals to malls will have their own turn-by-turn navigation. For some, the freedom of movement could be a life-changer.
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