How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS • Hacker News Board

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#41

Post by yodon » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

mpeg wrote: post #40

ndriscoll wrote: post #13

> They wanted to bring indoor maps and navigation to their retail stores... It turns out that this doesn’t just apply to retail. Every office, university campus, events venue, hotel, airport, warehouse, factory — basically everywhere indoors have some need to navigate people around, provide relevant information, and improve efficiency. You'd think they would add this information to openstreetmap then or at least put…

If you had read the article you would see: 1/ they need to collect ground truth data for their algorithm to work, it doesn't magically work everywhere. 2/ the ground truth data was collected mostly by their clients, it is not their data to give away for free I honestly don't see a problem with this technology, and I am a huge privacy advocate. First off, it uses the wifi signal strength + a model based on ground trut…

> If you had read the article you would see:

(1) It's clear from the use of quotes that the person you're replying to did read the article.

(2) from the official HN Guidelines[0]: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#42

Post by SkyPuncher » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #26

voidUpdate wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with them until they said that it's going to give me ads while I'm walking around

You might think shoppers finding their product in a store quickly would delight customers and pay for itself quickly. But it seems instead of stores simply depending on the sale, they also now demand impulse purchases, which mean they want you wandering the store looking in multiple places for your quarry: the casino model. So if they delight a customer with direct route to the sale, they need to make up that windfal…

It depends on the segment. All of the hardware stores near me have websites that list the exact aisle and bay product is in. They've seemed to figure out it's a competitive disadvantage to make their customers wander.

It's not entirely clear to me if grocers and other retail will end up taking the same route. Grocery service is increasingly move to hands-off (pickup or delivery) and other segments seem to be moving heavily on-line (including gig-delivery). It seems like they'll continue to punish foot traffic while encouraging customers to do online or hands-off buying.

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#43

Post by SkyPuncher » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #35

If indoor is so inaccurate, how does Apple find AirTags then?

My understanding is they use bluetooth for coarse positioning (e.g. you're within 30 feet) then they use a special chip (ultra-wide band) for the precision location (within a foot or two).

Of course, there's a good bit of magic within all of that to make it work seamlessly.

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#44

Post by amelius » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #43

amelius wrote: post #35

If indoor is so inaccurate, how does Apple find AirTags then?

My understanding is they use bluetooth for coarse positioning (e.g. you're within 30 feet) then they use a special chip (ultra-wide band) for the precision location (within a foot or two). Of course, there's a good bit of magic within all of that to make it work seamlessly.

Sounds to me like it is not a difficult problem except for the fact that they want to make it work with existing smartphones (both iOS and Android).

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#45

Post by numpad0 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

mentar wrote: post #3

How does your system handle the massive variance in sensor quality (accelerometer, gyro, WiFi radio) between a high-end iPhone and a budget Android device? Does the 1m accuracy hold up across the board, or does it degrade gracefully? Getting this right seems critical for scaling to a 'billion people'

Peripheral chips aren't differentiated by user values like the end products that use them. You don't get more preciser sensors in high end phones. Everyone gets the same thing. You pay more only for more materials.

Sensors that are actually a lot better than standard offerings would also be subject to and/ofs of ITAR or EAR or MTCR or local equivalents thereof, so progress in IMU appears to have been stagnating a bit due to that issue. Sony Semiconductor Solutions had a Arduino IDE compatible clustered IMU board that they say you can see rotation of Earth in data, they ended up selling it with scary warnings and without any of the cool stuffs.

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#46

Post by dimatura » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

The few examples they show do look pretty good for a wifi-based method, although who knows how cherry-picked they are. I wonder how much the "SLAM" part is contributing and how sensitive that is to the sensor quality on the phone. I would've assumed that they'd be using vision, which seems to be the method of choice for other companies like niantic. The ground-truth data part for vision would certainly be more onerous, though.

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#47

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

How fast do the WiFi signal strength maps get out of date?

Just someone changing the angle of an antenna or shifting a pile of stock near the router has to have a pretty big impact on signal strength.

And obviously a WiFi system upgrade where all the Mac addresses change must be a fairly big change and effectively gives a full service outage for all the users till you remap.

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#48

Post by Philip-J-Fry » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

leoedin wrote: post #24

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesco in the UK literally has this but only for staff. If you work for Tesco you can access any shop, view a map, view where stock is on a shelf, check stock numbers and expected delivery and all that stuff. Things that would absolutely be an amazing QOL improvement for any shopper. But they won't let you have it because they WANT you to bumble your way around a shop. They don't want you to know where things are. Tha…

I actually find this feature of supermarkets quite useful. Online shopping is far less discoverable - the end result is I forget things from my online shop quite often.

For me the end result is I buy random crap from the shop that I don't need. Sometimes it's good because it's new and I wanna try it, but sometimes it's just me being a pig.

I don't forget anything because I have a list.

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#49

Post by zokier » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

ckrapu wrote: post #18

Do you think the basic physics and sensor tolerances would let you go to 10^-2 meters if the environment (e.g. wifi station placements, location of RF-interfering elements) was designed by you?

If you want high performance indoor positioning , look into 5G carrier phase positioning which claims cm-level accuracy. Fuse that with IMU and optical sensing and you certainly should get decent results

Re: How Hyper built a 1M-accurate indoor GPS

#50

Post by ranger207 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #26

voidUpdate wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with them until they said that it's going to give me ads while I'm walking around

You might think shoppers finding their product in a store quickly would delight customers and pay for itself quickly. But it seems instead of stores simply depending on the sale, they also now demand impulse purchases, which mean they want you wandering the store looking in multiple places for your quarry: the casino model. So if they delight a customer with direct route to the sale, they need to make up that windfal…

Little bit of a tangent, but as a customer I am not "delighted" when I find a product quickly and easily; I am merely not frustrated. Finding what I'm looking for is the baseline experience, having to search for what I'm looking for makes me annoyed and less likely to buy anything other than what I need so I can just get out of there.

In my experience, any product or service advertising itself as "delighting" customers actually means that they're overall making the baseline experience worse, and their product/service is just reducing the frustration they're introducing.