Feature 101: Real-Time Positioning for Web

Mappedin announces Real-Time Positioning for Web, an add-on feature that brings another aspect of the full digital experience to our customers.

We have a wealth of information about the outdoors and how we interact with it, but are often blindsided when we go indoors by a lack thereof. Sometimes the information is available but not in a usable medium, or is not designed in a way that is intuitive for the end user. 

Our customers are focused on providing the best experience for their visitors, and investing in that experience to make it as engaging as possible. Similarly, all of Mappedin’s products are aimed at innovating, and making processes easier for everyone who touches them. 

Our latest feature is Real-time Positioning for Web, otherwise known as Blue Dot, which provides an advanced experience to those familiar with indoor mapping. This add-on allows users to see where they are as they move through a venue and enables turn-by-turn wayfinding from their current position. This application is the first of its kind in an embedded map experience.

What is real-time positioning? 

The blue dot experience has been a staple of outdoor navigation (typically used in native apps), allowing users to quickly see where they are and get directions from their location. However, the dependency on GPS location information is lost when we move indoors, and this opens the door for a myriad of sensor data needed to get a user’s position. This increases the overall investment needed and creates a barrier to entry and to useful data output. 

The trend in the industry is to use many forms of sensors (sensor fusion) to provide the infrastructure needed for indoor positioning. It is then common to build real-time-based experiences on top of this infrastructure. Native mobile applications have allowed for better control over what you can do with sensor data  which is why we haven’t seen the same kind of functionality offered through the web. This has lead to many of the positioning use cases being built as custom native apps.

Accessing a venue map that is powered by Mappedin Web with Blue Dot enabled allows users to automatically get directions from their current position, as well as orient themselves within the property. Blue Dot can also work in venues where there is a mix of  outdoor and indoor space. 

As most people are already comfortable with a navigation interface through familiarity with Google Maps or Apple Maps, Mappedin’s Blue Dot allows for that comfort to continue through a comparable indoor navigation experience. 

The addition of Blue Dot to a navigation experience allows venues to create a more successful and accurate wayfinding journey for their users, which in turn increases their efficiency. 

Knowing a user’s position in a venue is both key to delivering the best route possible from point A to point B, and allows businesses to understand why someone has come to your venue, how they move through it, and where they want to go.

Customer and user benefits 

The Blue Dot wayfinding experience helps to enhance the overall accuracy of the navigation as well as to help organizations understand how users move through a venue. Being able to understand that data and the resulting patterns puts power back in the hands of venue owners to react and plan accordingly. This opens the door for new analytics and data, like what paths people are taking and locations they have visited (through aggregated data rather than individual tracking).

From an end user perspective, it is much easier for them  to navigate to a website rather than a native app, and a more intuitive process to direct them to the main source for information online. People aren’t expecting to get a navigation experience like the one that the real-time positioning for web provides, allowing for a pleasant surprise and a full top-to-bottom experience.

Current customers who have implemented Blue Dot at their venues are seeing much higher engagement rates from visitors versus engagement prior to Blue Dot, and seeing those same visitors spend much longer in the experience than those without. 

By adding Blue Dot, the engagement is not only increasing but also the utility of the website and navigation experience. By having it front and centre, you give your users what they are looking for as well as increasing efficiency by making it easier for them to visit more places in your venue. The more places they visit, the better. 

Creating the Blue Dot experience within web is something that has not been seen in the industry to date. Additionally, the more our customers can drive users to their websites, the more impact they have over the entire digital experience as an uninterrupted extension of their brand. 

Blue dot navigation in the future 

Utilizing Blue Dot has been the standard so far in native apps due to beacons prior to now. However, when it comes to web, we predict that this is the new direction that technology is headed. The addition of Blue Dot is a natural extension of our product, and is another way that we will ensure that our customers have access to the latest technology and features that fit their needs.

Learn more about our web solution on our website.