You’re shopping for shower curtain rings and can’t figure out where in the store they are. Imaging opening up an app on your phone that will give you turn by turn directions. There are over a dozen solutions to solve the issue of indoor GPS or positioning. Most are pretty expensive and require infrastructure and well as a software implementation. Intel is demoing yet another implementation that seems like it could be more cost effective then a lot of solutions out there. All you need are some LEDs that you’ve programmed to flash faster then the eye can see and a smartphone with a front facing camera.
High power white LEDs are expected to replace the existing lighting technologies in near future anyways and they can be used for visible light communication (VLC). They can be programmed with an algorithm for high precision indoor positioning.
When the front facing camera tracks the over heard lighting the unknown position was then calculated from the geometrical relations of the LED images created on the image sensors. If you have to light your store, why not throw in the ability to have a store navigation app?
