Indoor navigation systems

Every indoor navigation pitch opens with the same picture: a blue dot gliding along a corridor, turn-by-turn directions to meeting room 4B.

It is a good demo. It is also the most expensive way to solve a problem that, in most buildings, is really about naming and signage. This page covers how the technology works, what each option costs to run, and how to work out whether you need any of it.

What is an indoor navigation system?

An indoor navigation system helps someone get from where they are to where they want to be inside a building. That splits into two jobs that are often confused.

The first is knowing where the person is. Outdoors that is GPS. Indoors it takes beacons, Wi-Fi, ultra-wideband or a scanned code. The second is knowing the building well enough to plan a route, which means an indoor map with connected floors.

Plenty of buildings buy an expensive answer to the first question when their actual problem was that they had never answered the second.

How the positioning technologies compare

Every option trades accuracy against how much hardware you have to install and keep alive.

What it costs to run, not just to buy

Install quotes are the easy part to compare. The running costs are where projects quietly go wrong.

A beacon network for a mid-sized hospital might need several hundred beacons. Each has a battery with a life measured in years, which means a recurring job for someone with a ladder and a map of where they all are. Wi-Fi positioning avoids that but is rarely precise enough to distinguish adjacent rooms, which is exactly the distinction visitors care about.

Then there is the app. Blue-dot systems generally need one, because they require background access to Bluetooth and motion sensors. That means an install step at the front door, and the drop-off there is brutal: a visitor who is already late is not going to the app store.

When you genuinely need positioning

Some buildings do. The pattern is fairly consistent.

• The space is huge and time-critical. Airports and major transit hubs, where being slightly lost means missing something with a departure time.
• You need to track things, not just guide people. Asset tracking for equipment or stock is a positioning problem that signage cannot touch.
• Visitors are already in your app. If people install your app anyway to book, order or check in, adding navigation to it avoids the install barrier entirely.
• The route genuinely needs turn-by-turn. If the honest answer is “second floor, follow the blue signs”, you do not need metre-level accuracy to say so.

The option in the middle

If none of those describe your building, there is a cheaper path that solves most of the same problem.

Put a code on the signs you already have. When someone scans it, the code tells the map which sign they are standing at, so the map opens with their position already pinned. No beacons, because the position comes from the sign. No app, because it opens in the browser. From there they search for the room or department they want.

That is what QRCodeMaps does. It does not follow someone down a corridor, and for the majority of buildings that turns out not to be the thing that was missing. What was missing was a searchable, current map at the point where people stop and look around.

Plans start from $99 a month with a free trial, so you can test it on one floor before deciding whether the building needs anything more.