Lobster-Inspired Tech Helps Smartphones Navigate Indoors

It’s easy enough to get directions on a phone when outdoors — but try finding your way around the mall. Soon, you may be able to pull up your location on an indoor map using a new mobile technology.

The indoor location technology, which was developed by researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland, uses a smartphone’s built-in compass, or magnetometer, to scan for variations in the Earth’s magnetic field inside a structure. The information is transmitted to an online server for analysis, and then stitched together into a virtual landscape of the building.

The result would be a map with a dot that follows the smartphone user around wherever he moves inside a building. Janne Haverinen, director of the project, was inspired by lobsters, which sense variations in magnetic fields to mentally map their own surroundings and find their way home. He says the indoor-location product is complete, and his team is working to provide a toolkit, or API, for app developers to create indoor maps for different purposes.

Mr. Haverinen said there could be several applications for the technology that go well beyond finding the cereal aisle in the grocery store. If, say, the fire department were equipped with an app, it could potentially locate where a person is inside a burning building and go to his rescue. Conversely, if a person inside a building were in trouble, she could use an indoor map to look for the emergency exit. Smartphone owners could also use the technique to find where their friends are indoors.