On April 17th, I went to Shinjuku-ku in Tokyo Japan to take a Highway Express Bus to Kawaguchiko in order to see Mt. Fuji. Anyways, on the second floor, I saw those wayfinding floor signs that lead people from the escalator to the exact place where the bus station is.
In fact, that makes it really easy to find your way in the metro and other places, especially if you are a tourist like I am.
The thing is that the moment I saw those signs, I knew that augmented reality will make those signs a thing of the past. Yes, maybe not so fast, but that they will come that we would no longer need those.
Indoors wayfinding will be very easy using AR glasses or smartphones. There are already apps that do this for outdoor navigation like HotStepper, but I haven’t come across a good one for indoor wayfinding. I guess everyone is waiting for AR cloud, and one those SDKs from leading AR Cloud brands will become publicly accessible for developers, we are going to see a rain of apps that are going to do just that.
I’m sure that Google, Apple, and many other companies will jump into this indoor wayfinding applications, as this is a very much needed service, not just for tourists, but for anyone who needs to find a specific place in an indoor environment. This can be a parking lot on the ground floor or a cinema located on the 4th floor.
Anyways, I wanted to share this though. It would be amazing having such an app that can do just that, and for any place, especially those places that you would never find any wayfinding signs on the floor.