Navigation apps are probably some of the most needed ones, in this age of people always being mobile and traveling one way or another. But what if what you needed to navigate was not a street or a city but inside a building or an indoor structure? Microsoft has recently released Path Guide, a “completely map-free, infrastructure-free, plug-and-play indoor navigation service” to serve as a guide to destinations using the path of an earlier “traveler”.
Basically, what the app does is to use your natural walking patterns to create a map-less guide, whether it’s for an event, a museum, a game, or whatever purpose you would need it for. First of all, you do the whole walk through and your smartphone records the sensory data and using geomagnetic features, it will build a reference trace. The information will then be sent to the cloud and can be used by others for navigation. Then the reference trace will be compared and synchronized with the current sensor readings and will guide the user in real time.
Concept-wise of course it’s great. But the implementation may need a bit of tweaking and improvement. Making the paths is pretty easy, but searching for existing routes or layouts of areas you often go to is a bit trickier. Even though one of its selling points is that it’s map-free, they might want to consider partnering with a mapping service later on to make it easier.
Path Guide seems to be an introduction/demo kind of product so we will probably see more improvements later on. But if you want to try it out, you can already download it from the Google Play Store for free.
