![]() Big commercial applications will begin to emerge this year, he says for instance, a German retail chain is using Wi-Fi in a pilot project to push information to shoppers depending on their location in a store. With accuracy ranging from one meter to 20 meters, says Korhonen, Wi-Fi mapping is generally more precise than cellular triangulation. Each location was matched to a specific signal strength, so that when museumgoers accessed the network, it knew where they were. Once the map was uploaded into a computer, employees walked around the museum, clicking on the map every three meters and recording the network’s signal strength. To achieve this virtual docent delivery, Accenture employees drew a detailed map of the exhibit area-a process that can take an hour for every 1,000 square meters covered, says Korhonen. ![]() This past spring, consulting firm Accenture used Ekahau’s software in a pilot project for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: patrons wandering the Met’s cavernous halls and stopping at a few of its two million works of art received information about the pieces in front of them with the click of a PDA button. This expanding infrastructure can also be used to locate people indoors, says Antti Korhonen, CEO of Helsinki, Finland-based Ekahau, which builds software that enables Wi-Fi location finding. Numerous wireless carriers have begun installing Wi-Fi transceivers in hotels, cafs, and other commercial buildings to deliver high-speed Internet access to mobile users. So what kind of technology could be used once a person steps inside and takes the elevator up, up, and away? One possibility is the popular wireless networking technology known as 802.11, or Wi-Fi. Although this isn’t an issue in many applications, it could mean the difference between life and death to soldiers trying to identify friends and foes in an urban warfare setting or firefighters searching for victims in a blaze. Assisted GPS can lose much of its accuracy due to ceilings, walls, and other obstructions, while cellular techniques don’t even come close to making the grade: a 120-meter error range may let you spot a flashing restaurant sign down a city block, but even a five-meter miss in a skyscraper could put a user on a completely different floor. ![]() Tracking users becomes much more challenging indoors, however.
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