This is pretty sweet. Demo video really helps to explain the concept. It's like what I imagined my friends and I doing while playing Rockband...if we were talented enough to play real instruments. Seems like one of those things that you can't imagine a future without. Nice work @fivedogit
Just published a new iPhone app dev tutorial, meant for absolute beginners. Covers Xcode basics, some Objective-C, and making a simple app. Looking for honest feedback. This is one of my first screencast tutorials, would like tips on improving future ones! This link will provide for 50 people to take the course for free: https://www.udemy.com/iphone-app-crash-course/?couponCode=sh...
PM me if this code runs out and you'd like to try it.
Yes, we can live without indoor maps, but we're suffering through a lot of inefficiencies just because we don't know yet that there's a better option.
I want indoor maps because they can help reduce healthcare costs. It costs us all money when people get lost in hospitals. While environmental signage helps, it's often not sufficient. Visitors end up interrupting doctors and nurses to ask for directions. This directly costs the hospital money (leads to higher personnel costs), and leads to a poor customer experience (affects the recovery process for patients and families). It is surprising how many people get lost in hospitals: http://twitter.com/lostinabuilding
In addition to navigation, there are uses for facilities management, inventory management, real estate sales, and analytics on how people use buildings. I'm a big fan of using data to improve human efficiency, and these can help save time/energy/money.
For retail environments, indoor maps present targeted advertising opportunities, which can lead to more efficient advertising spending for brands and retailers, and time savings for consumers. This is part of why Google is so interested in indoor maps.
Good question. This is why a more transparent indoor mapping process could breed innovation (a standard format) and better curation (allowing users to find and fix incorrect floor plans, a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia).
While the technology for making indoor map content (georeferencing a floor plan) is already widely available, most smartphones do a very poor job of positioning themselves indoors. GPS doesn't work inside, leaving cell and wifi trilateration as the most readily available alternatives.
Another likely factor for Google deploying on Android only is the ability to use wifi signal strength data from the phone to do approximate indoor positioning (the you-are-here "little blue dot"). Apple chose to lock developers out of the API for reading wifi signal strength, which limits the iPhone's ability to do indoor positioning (or show you nearby wifi routers).
In Apple's defense, the indoor positioning experience on Android does not meet the high expectations that GPS has set for users. Instead of a precise little blue dot, you get a 10-30m wide big blue circle. Some of the positioning hardware announced from chipset makers like CSR and Broadcom may improve this situation in the next generation of handsets.
Data access/usability vs. security/privacy is a worthy concern for building data. I think we will see a designation made based on level of detail. Blueprints (with details about structural features) should not be publicly available. However, simplified floor plans for public spaces are already publicly displayed, as required for fire evacuation purposes.
Where that "level of detail" line is drawn is an important discussion as the availability of indoor maps from Google, Bing, OSM, Micello, etc. continues to expand.
Have you seen Aisle411 for retail stores? They have some crowdsourced information (aisles in which products are located), which might be easier to maintain than more granular (exact Lat/Lon) location.
One of my fellow panelists from Google discussed ways for developers to use Google's existing map tools to create their own indoor map content. This uses the Google Maps slippy map API, but doesn't require the developer to submit indoor map data to Google: http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/map-your-busin...
I would also like to see indoor map data, especially for public spaces, be more freely (libre) available. There are a few contributors at OpenStreetMap working on indoor maps, but privacy/data structure/data acquisition pose significant challenges. I'm sure they'd be interested in your help!
LexKY in the house! Our team just got back from Betaspring, we have come a long way since our early days hacking with the NUIGroup / CCV tools: http://nuicode.com/projects/tbeta
We've narrowed our focus to indoor map applications. We're still deploying them on giant touchscreens with AwesomeTouch, but have also started a project called BuildingLayer to aggregate & crowdsource maps for the insides of buildings (because people always get http://lostinabuilding.com). And just ask John King from CNN, the only thing better than games on a giant touchscreen are maps!
Thanks for the mention @jadedoto. You're correct, we're not running Android on our screens, but there is an Android port for MT4j, the Java multitouch framework we use: http://www.mt4j.org/blog/index.php?entry=entry110404-105831 If this Android x86 port comes further along (and there's some way to do remote administration for Android), maybe we can start developing for Android first, and porting that over to the large screens.
On the hardware side, one of the unfortunate limitations with most large touchscreens in that price range is that they only accept 2 touchpoints. For most applications, that's sufficient, but Martin mentioned that one of his goals is to enable multiple users to simultaneously interact. While the opportunity for that is a bit limited on his Acer screen, the larger screen size alone does make it easier for two users to view the screen simultaneously, and it's easier for them to alternate in usage without passing the screen back and forth.