Lost in a Mall? Microsoft Shows you the Path.

GPS is amazing. Gone are the days when we needed to roll down the windows and trouble a random passer-by for the directions of a new place we are visiting. We just put in the location, and ta-da! You are guided to the place, by a voice you choose, learning names of roads you didn't even know existed. 

The indoor spaces of today can be really confusing to navigate around

But when we are indoors, say at a mall, a plaza, or even a theater, GPS fizzles out. The beast of outdoor navigation couldn't tell a bathroom from a screen indoors. Not that it's a fault. The walls of buildings, distort the received data, and indoor maps, aren't good anyway. How do we solve this?

While GPS is out of question, we look at other options such a WiFi positioning and Bluetooth Beacons. But, these would require you to install additional hardware in those places, something which isn't pragmatic everywhere. This is where Microsoft Path Guide comes in.

Microsoft Path Guide is a completely new approach to indoor navigation, with meager dependencies. Rather than creating maps and acquiring your location, Path Guide depends on users to train their systems by letting them create ways from Point A to Point B, which can be accessed on a peer to peer basis. 

In the words of Microsoft-

"To make the system work for anyone, we developed a peer-to-peer leader/follower model. Once a user goes to an indoor location using the app to record sensor data along a path, any other user can follow that path and get there. As more users collect data, different paths can be combined that make the system even more useful."  

        

Basically, suppose you are at the entrance of a mall and need to reach the food court. You start Path Guide, to which you feed the Points. From there on, you will be navigated to your destination based on the path that other people have taken to reach there. In essence, you are following a trail. The app leverages your phones sensors such as Accelerometer, Compass, and Barometer to accurately  guide you based on the steps you take and the floors you are on. What more, you can record your path and follow it backwards, eliminating the scenario where you enter some place, and are unable to get out. 

While Microsoft itself admits that the project needs a lot more polishing, it is delightful to see such a fresh approach to navigation from Microsoft, proving that all it takes to compete in a saturated market, is thinking out of the box. Furthermore, a good part of Google Maps is also crowd-sourced, why not give it a chance folks?

The app is currently available for Android only.

Official Website: Microsoft Path Guide .

Play Store Link: Click here

Did you try it out? What's your take on it? Let us know in the comments below.