Indoor wayfinding: systems, signage and software

Outdoors, navigation is a solved problem. Your phone knows where you are to within a few metres and every mapping app will walk you there.

Step through the front door of a hospital or a conference centre and all of that stops working. GPS does not pass through concrete, and the building your visitor is standing in is a blank space on the map.

Indoor wayfinding is the set of approaches that fill that gap. This page covers how each one works, roughly what it costs, and how to tell which one your building actually needs.

What is indoor wayfinding?

Indoor wayfinding is helping people navigate inside a building, where satellite positioning does not reach. It spans everything from a printed floor plan by the lift through to a live blue dot that follows someone down a corridor.

The reason it is a separate discipline from outdoor navigation is not just the missing GPS signal. Indoor spaces stack vertically, so a route has to handle floor changes. They change layout far more often than streets do. And the destinations have no addresses, only names that the organisation invented and frequently changes.

Does Google Maps have indoor maps?

For a small number of very large venues, yes. Google has indoor floor plans for many major airports, some transit stations and a slice of large shopping centres, and in a handful of those it offers Live View walking directions.

For almost every other building the answer is no. Coverage depends on the venue submitting floor plans and keeping them current, and Google does not guarantee they will be published or updated. If you run an office, a clinic, a warehouse or a campus, assume you are on your own.

Do GPS trackers work indoors?

Not reliably. GPS needs line of sight to satellites, and roofs, reinforced concrete and steel frames block it. You will sometimes get a position near a window, then watch it drift by twenty metres or vanish entirely as someone walks further in.

That is why indoor positioning uses different signals: Bluetooth beacons, Wi-Fi triangulation, ultra-wideband anchors, or the phone's own motion sensors. All of them need hardware installed in the building, which is the single biggest cost driver in the category.

The four approaches, and what they cost

There is no best option, only a match between what a building needs and what it is willing to install and maintain. The costs below are broad planning ranges for a mid-sized building.

How to tell which one you need

Most buildings talk themselves into positioning hardware and then discover the problem was never location accuracy.

• Ask what people actually get wrong. If visitors reach the right floor and then cannot find the room, you have a naming and signage problem. A blue dot will not fix it.
• Count your decision points, not your square metres. A large warehouse with one straight spine is easier to navigate than a small clinic with four wings and two lift cores.
• Ask how often the layout changes. If departments move more than once a year, anything printed is a running cost and anything you can edit is an asset.
• Be honest about maintenance. Beacons have batteries. Kiosks have screens that fail. Whoever owns that budget should be in the room before you choose.

The middle option most buildings skip

Between a printed sign and a full positioning install there is an option that covers most of the need for a fraction of the cost.

QRCodeMaps puts a code on the signage you already have. Someone scans it and sees the floor plan with a pin showing exactly where they are standing, because the code tells the map which sign it came from. From there they can search for a room, a department or a facility and see the route.

There is no app, because it opens in the phone browser. There is no hardware, because the code is just ink. And when the layout changes you edit a marker instead of raising a purchase order.

It does not give a live blue dot. If your building genuinely needs turn-by-turn tracking, buy positioning. If what you need is for people to stop asking reception where radiology is, start here. Plans begin at $99 a month with a free trial.