Hi,
I have a project for which I need to display augmented reality content based on indoor positioning data. I have a couple of questions regarding that and your upcoming uwb beacons.
A) Is the uwb used only for creating floor-maps or is there any hope that it also increases the indoor positioning accuracy? Correct me if I am wrong but I believe the majority of current smartphones don’t support uwb quite yet but perhaps there are some interesting methods to improve the positioning regardless.
B) Our time-frame for making a demo is quite limited, when would it be reasonable to expect more info on the uwb beacon launch date? A few weeks make a huge difference in our current situation so any indicaton on when any specific info could become available would be very helpful.
C) As I understand you currently support 2d location mapping. Is there any chance a 3D mapping could be achieved if beacons are not on the same height but still in known locations. In our current case we may not be able to place beacons on walls only but also in the ceiling. Given that we get the approx. distance from beacon to phone and the height difference, it should be quite simple to calculate the distance on the same height level. Have you done any such testing, did it seem like it could be usable?
All the best,
Christer
a. At this time, we use the UWB just to create the floor plan. Is that helping accuracy? Yes and no. Yes, because accurate indoor positioning starts with an accurate floor plan. No, because if you build a very accurate floor plan yourself, the results should be the same. (UWB beacons still make this process much faster, easier, cheaper, and less prone to human error.)
b. We’re getting close to shipping the first dev kits, but sadly I can’t provide anything more specific at this time.
c. Sure thing, with enough beacons, it 3D should be doable. To be honest though, we haven’t been looking into it ourselves, 'cause we’re yet to find a good use case for (x,y,z) indoor positioning (: Do you have one in mind?
Thank you very much for the answer. In our case we may need to place beacons either on the ceiling/under the floor or something along those lines as the venue is quite a huge open space and the tracking has to be reasonably good throughout. It is not that much of an issue of tracking people moving up/down but having beacons on different height levels function well together. Perhaps 3D mapping was not the best of terms :).
Oh, gotcha!
You can place the beacons on whatever height you want, the only “hard” requirements is, they should all be roughly at the same height. The “soft” requirements that should help achieve the best accuracy are: clear line of sight to the users, and reasonably close to the users. For example, hiding the beacons behind some furniture, or putting them all on a 20 meter high ceiling might negatively affect the accuracy.