Movea showed off a way to use a phone’s existing sensors to calculate your position indoors, a beast of a problem for mobile devices. Typical global-positioning system (GPS) satellite data works outdoors, with a line of sight to satellites in space. Wi-Fi triangulation helps improve accuracy. These technologies aren’t as useful inside buildings where signals don’t reach.

But Movea demonstrated accurate indoor navigation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Movea’s indoor navigation systems uses signals from an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, pressure sensor, Wi-Fi, GPS, and matching against known maps. The first thing Movea’s mobile app does is ask you for your height. From that, it can estimate your step length. When you move, the accelerometer in your phone registers the step, and the app then figures out that you’ve moved. The magnetometer, used for a compass, determines which way you are facing.

Movea takes into account the difference in step length when you are moving faster or slower. Over time, it figures out your trajectory and then uses it for your location.

At the Las Vegas Hotel, David Rothenberg, director of marketing and partner alliances at Movea, showed how his company created software that could calculate a route through the middle of the hotel, up the elevators to the sixth floor, and to the right room.

“It’s very early days for indoor navigation, so you’ll see occasional artifacts,” he said as we walked through the halls of the hotel. “Once inside, we use no Wi-Fi, no GPS, and no cellular network data.”

One thing that improves accuracy is “map matching.” It picked up accurate blueprints for the inside of the hotel from the owner. It uses those to match your location. If you’re walking down a hallway, it will correct the location if you suddenly seem to be walking through room walls, based on faulty step calculations or faulty sensor signals. The system is context aware. If you are in an elevator, it knows that. If it senses a change in the pressure, it will figure out that you are going up the elevator. The pressure change was measured by a pressure sensor, which is present in the Samsung Galaxy III smartphone that Rothenberg used.

Rothenberg’s smartphone screen showed the path the whole way, though it had to halt a couple of times to fix its bearings. As we rose in the elevator, Movea’s software figured out which floor we were on, and it prompted us to get off when we hit the sixth floor. Movea put its logo in the hallway on the sixth floor. Rothenberg pointed the phone’s camera (using augmented reality) at the logo to reset the map to the sixth floor blueprints. From there, he walked to the Movea suite.

This kind of calculation won’t work in uncontrolled environments yet, particularly if the company doesn’t have indoor blueprints for a building. But indoor location isn’t so crazy an idea as phones become equipped with more and more sensors.

One of the challenges is getting blueprints for the indoor landmarks within every building on the planet. That’s going to take some time to do. Mapping companies such as Google have embarked on that task, and Movea will be happy to help them calculate location accurately once they did out that data.

Movea showed off its full-body motion-tracking technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

In a demo, the French company attached 15 sensors to a dancer (pictured) to show how it can gather data, transmit it wirelessly to a PC, and there process the motion signals. An image-based or video-based motion capture system, such as those used in movies, would cost about $50,000, said Sam Guilaume, chief executive at France’s Movea. Movea took the signals from the dancer and turned the movements into a stylized dancing demonstration.

But Movea’s system is available for less than $10,000. Over time, Movea hopes to be able to capture the same data on a person with just five sensors and drive the cost down toward $200.

“It’s becoming very affordable and with that the number of applications is growing,” Guilaume said.

Movea uses off-the-shelf sensors for its applications, but it has invested heavily in data fusion, motion processing firmware, software and intellectual property for consumer electronics applications.

The company has more than 440 patents and licenses its SmartFusion technologies in mobile, interactive TV, and sports markets. In sports, the company does athletic performance analysis. The aim is to enable other companies to quickly add interactivity and motion-awareness to their products.

Orange, the European telecom services firm, recently partnered with Movea to create a motion-sensing set-top box for interactive TV applications.

Each of the sensors knows its own orientation in 3D spaces and the sensors are paired for better accuracy. The result is full-body motion capture.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The next fronter in location technology could be your supermarket.

Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm, and 19 other companies are working together in a new indoor location-focused venture called In-Location.

Using a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, indoor location technology allows for a much finer degree of precision than what’s available with current technology. This in turn means applications far more impressive than just indoor navigation.

With the partnership, the member companies aim to invest in and create use cases for indoor location services, which they aim to put in consumer devices by next year.

Indoor location has been getting a lot of interest as of late, with companies like Google and CSR already making moves with the technology. CSR has been demoing the technology for months, though the new joint venture aims to take its efforts even further.

One big potential use is allowing smartphone users to broadcast their locations on a more exact level, allowing friends to find them in crowds with minimal fuss (think about what this will mean for services like Foursquare). Retailers could also make use of the technology by using apps to direct customers to products at specific parts of their stores. It’s all about precision.

Here’s the full list of the alliance’s members:

Broadcom, CSR, Dialog Semiconductor, Eptisa, Geomobile, Genasys, Indra, Insiteo, Nokia, Nomadic Solutions, Nordic Semiconductor, Nordic Technology Group, NowOn, Primax Electronics, Qualcomm, RapidBlue Solutions, Samsung Electronics, Seolane Innovation, Sony Mobile Communications, TamperSeal AB, Team Action Zone and Visioglobe.