14 DAY TRIAL // Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has just announced the availability of an update to its Destination Maps, the service that provides users with indoor coverage.
Destination Maps was made official at CTIA in spring, capable of offering orientation, routing and guidance indoors with the same accuracy as outdoors.
Today’s indoor venues are much larger than before, and also increasingly complex, which makes it more difficult for users to find their way when inside.
“With Destination Maps, you can search for the football, find out the stores that carry it, know exactly where to park or which door to enter, and get the fastest walking route directly to that store,” Rahul Desai notes in a post on Nokia Conversations.
“Incorporating Destination Maps into location apps or onto a specific device eliminates the stress and the unnecessary time spent reading floor plans or guessing which store carries the football.”
In addition to offering shopping malls coverage, Destination Maps also provides users with coverage for retail stores, airports, and transit hubs.
The service grew from covering 214 shopping malls in the US to offering mapping in 4,605 venues around the world. At the moment, Destination Maps offers indoors coverage in 38 countries.
“While other providers claim to have powerful indoor map offerings with a large number of venues mapped, Destination Maps are not just the average 2D floor plans that can be viewed on a device,” Nokia notes.
“Our indoor map content enables a full end-to-end experience, making the exploration and discovery of indoor places more realistic.”
At the same time, Destination Maps promises a variety of interior map attributes, including escalators, floor levels, ATMs and restrooms, which result in better guidance and routing.
Nokia also notes that Destination Maps was designed to work seamlessly with other Nokia Location Content offerings.
“Dynamic content such as movie listings, flight times or transit schedules can all be added to these indoor maps, providing even further value to end-users,” Nokia notes.
The service is available on a wide range of devices and PNDs. Moreover, it was implemented in Bing Maps, and it powers Microsoft’s Bing Venue Maps.
People spend up to 90 percent of their time indoors, which means that there is indeed a need for making routing and indoor discovery faster and easier. However, indoor mapping is online in its infancy, and the service is expected to grow significantly in the near future.
