designed to allow passengers to relax and make the best use of their available time at the airport.

Using indoor navigation and up-to-date personalised information from airports and airlines, the PASSME App monitors the stress levels of a passenger wearing the smart wristband, and provides helpful notifications about how best to manage stress and arrive at their gate on time.

The PASSME App is a breakthrough on the PASSME project. The PASSME project aims to reduce unwanted door-to-door air travel time in Europe by an hour and to make the airport experience less stressful and more enjoyable for passengers.

The PASSME project is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 636308.

To learn more about the PASSME project, please visit http://www.passme.eu or follow us on Twitter @PASSME_EU

Apple has today expanded its list of indoor mapping locations with a few new airports; iPhone and iPad can now explore Sydney International, Edinburgh and Hamad Internationl (Doha, Qatar) Indoor mapping for airports lets you find check-in desks, baggage claim carousels and more. You can search for restrooms, shops and places to eat and even get walking directions straight to your boarding gate.

To start indoor mapping, you can just zoom into a supported location. When your zoom level is close enough, Maps switches from the standard map to focus on the indoor POIs and layout. It adds a floor level selector to the top right of the screen.

Indoor mapping is highlighted by a ‘look inside’ label next to the map badge – which you can tap as a shortcut to jump in.

If you are heading on a flight to these airports in the future, you can navigate to the map and ‘look inside’ ahead of time to get a feel for the layout. When you arrive, location services pinpoint exactly where you are in the building.

Maps offers up common filters as part of the airport’s summary card, so you can just tap to search for  terminals, check-ins, gates, baggage claim, food, shops and toilets. You can also ask Siri to navigate to your gate number or nearby restaurants, for instance.

These features are available as part of iOS 11, so check them out on iPhone or iPad. There are now 59 airports in the world that Apple has indoor mapping data for. You can see the full list here.

source : Apple maps Adds

Proximity Marketing | Indoor Positioning | Malls

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Every editorial product is independently selected by Mashable journalists. If you buy something featured, we may earn an affiliate commission which helps support our journalism.
Raise your hand if you remember what a joke Apple Maps was when it launched? It was a complete disaster.
These days, Apple Maps isn’t as embarrassing and actually pretty feature-packed. And in some ways it’s ahead of Google Maps (yeah, I can’t believe it either). Case in point: indoor mapping for airports and shopping malls.

Mapping the outside world isn’t easy, but compared to indoor mapping, it’s a piece of cake.

Whereas you only need to drive a bunch of camera-equipped cars up and down streets to take pictures and pull data from satellite imagery — I’m over-simplifying things here, so please don’t drag me — creating accurate maps for indoor spaces with multiple floors is much more difficult.

It’s why nobody — not even Google, which introduced indoor mapping for retailers, transit hubs, and malls in Google Maps for Android way back in 2011 — has really done it very well yet.

Apple’s first stab at indoor maps is limited to airports and malls, but I think it’s a good first start. I’d rather have it done really well than done in a half-baked way the way Google Maps’ implementation is right now

Indoor maps for Apple Maps was first announced at WWDC with a gradual rollout for a dozen or so airports in various cities around the world with the launch of iOS 11.
As of Thursday, Apple Maps has detailed indoor maps for 34 U.S. and international airports. Apple’s also added floor plans for malls in nine U.S. cities, but doesn’t list any specific ones. (I guess you’ll have to go to your local mall and find out?) You can find a list of all airports that have Apple Maps indoor mapping on Apple’s website here.
The tech giant invited me to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to walk through JetBlue’s Terminal 5 of gates, shops, and restaurants to check out indoor mapping for myself.
I was extremely skeptic at first, but after trying it out, I’m inclined to say they might have just figured out how to make navigating through airports a little less stressful.
Reducing pre-flight stress
I think most people will agree with me when I say airports aren’t exactly places anyone really wants to spend a lot of time in (unless maybe you’re The Points Guy living it up in a first class lounge).
Despite having a zillion signs to guide you, airports are messy and invite stress even if you’re the really chill type. There’s a good chance you’ll walk in the wrong direction from where your gate is. Or you’ll walk down a seemingly-endless terminal looking for dining or a shop, only to discover the options are lame.

Whatever the case is, being at an airport sucks. They’re not places I’d choose to explore because I’m not there to have a good time. I’m there to catch a plane to wherever I need to go, and that’s it.

Having indoor maps of airports, however, alleviates a lot of this pre-flight stress and anxiety that I and many people feel after passing through security check.
Instead of wasting time wandering through a terminal looking for, say, a Starbucks at 7:30 a.m., you can literally fire up Apple Maps and look at the floor plan of your terminal and see if there is one inside, what time it’s open, and where it’s located.
Just knowing what’s inside of an airport — like what your dining and shopping options are or where the restrooms are located — relative to where your boarding gate is makes a big difference in informing travelers on how best to use their time.
Very straightforward
Indoor mapping works exactly as you’d expect it to. Opening up Apple Maps when you’re in an airport with indoor mapping reveals a “Look Inside” button listed underneath the terminal name.
Tap it and you’ll be brought to a map of the ground floor. As you zoom in on the map, you’ll see additional location points for things like restrooms, baggage claim areas, staircases, dining and shopping, and boarding gates.
Tapping on the “1” (ground floor) opens up indoor maps for all the different floors available. In the case of Terminal 5, I could bring up floor plans for four levels and one underground floor.
Areas that have indoor maps are presented in white. Everything else is grayed out so there’s no confusion as to what information you’re looking at.
Your location appears as a blue dot and there’s also a directional arrow that turns as your iOS device moves, just like for outdoor maps.
From there, you can take a look at the airport terminal shops and layout in 2D or swipe down with two fingers for a 3D view.
Apple says it’s working with the owners of supported airports (in my case, the Port Authority) to nail down this feature. I’m told indoor maps in airports and malls are accurate down to three meters, and constantly updated when old vendors close and new ones open up.

True enough, I walked down through several floors of Terminal 5 and the maps were indeed pretty accurate. The MUJI to Go and Baked by Melissa cupcakes shops were exactly where Apple Maps said they’d be, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover there was an Aunt Butchie’s Bakery Café and not nothing at the very end of one really long hall.

The feature is by no means perfect, though. It doesn’t tell you if there’s moving walkways ahead, where seats/tables are, or where USB charging ports might be. These are minor things that could easily be added in later, but would have been great today.
I also wish there was a way know see the time to indoor destination. When I’m at the airport and I’m trying to figure out if I should goto that McDonald’s on that’s nowhere near my gate, my decision usually comes down to whether or not I have time to get there and come back. It’s nice knowing where the McDonald’s is located inside of the terminal, but an estimation of how long it’d take to get there and maybe even how long the line would be during certain hours would be extra useful.
For security purposes, indoor maps doesn’t show everything. Things that are irrelevant for travelers, like maintenance closets or staff office rooms aren’t included in the schematics.
And speaking of security, Apple says it’s not tracking your every movement within an airport or mall, monitoring where you’ve eaten or what stores you’ve stepped foot in, because it respects customer privacy. Unlike Google, Apple’s main business isn’t advertising and it doesn’t need to sell your main data to companies in order to keep the lights on.
I’m also told that the navigating features are done securely on your device and not associated with your Apple ID in any way. So that’s another plus over any Google Maps tracking. This approach to privacy is no different from iBeacons, the little Bluetooth transmitters that vendors can install to ping your iOS device when it’s within range. They collect no personally identifiable information.
A big step forward for mapping
What Apple’s doing with indoor maps may not seem like a big deal, but it is. It’s constrained to 2D and 3D for now, but just imagine what it could look like if Apple adds augmented reality to it. It could be immersive as what Google’s promising with Tango-based Visual Positioning Service (VPS) mapping system.
Like how Google Maps changed the way we navigate the world, I predict indoor mapping will be just as impactful.

source : https://tinyurl.com/yd4mjmxn

• George Bush Intercontinental Airport and William P. Hobby Airport in Houston began providing an indoor navigation service to help smartphone users find their way to gates, ground transportation, ticket kiosks, shops, restaurants and security checkpoints, according to a press release by the airport system. The turn-by-turn wayfinding technology developed by San Francisco’s LocusLabs doesn’t require a separate app download to work on smartphones, the first of its kind in the world, per the press release.
• By visiting the website fly2houston.com on a mobile browser, a traveler can see a map of the airports that indicates a user’s location with a blue dot. As a person walks around, the navigation tool provides live directions on the quickest way to reach a destination inside the airport. It also shows the estimated time needed to walk to the endpoint.
• The Houston Airport System, which runs the facilities, said airport maps are some of the most frequently visited pages on the fly2houston.com website. George Bush Intercontinental Airport is the 14th busiest in the U.S. and 43rd busiest in the world with 41.6 million passengers a year, according to Airports Council International. William P. Hobby Airport had 12.9 million visitors last year.

The Houston Airport System is showing another way that airports can provide indoor navigation information without requiring travelers to download an app that they’ll likely use just once or twice a year. The mobile web solution provides the flexibility to work with a variety of smartphones with different platforms or versions of operating systems.

The navigation app may eventually give retailers and restaurants in the airport opportunities to highlight special deals, which is likely to be welcome news for businesses in the airports as North American airport retail sales are estimated to more than double to $9.9 billion by 2020 from $4.2 billion in 2015. Reaching mobile users with an offer when they are nearby could drive traffic into retailers and restaurants.

Because airport apps aren’t nearly as popular as airline apps, which are used more often for frequent flyers loyal to one airline, more airports might strive to implement web-based location systems. Apps for the largest 25 airlines were downloaded 117 million times, or 14x as many downloads for airport apps, according to one estimate by advisers cited in Tnooz. By next year, 80% of airports will have implemented mobile apps, per a SITA survey that suggested airports are wasting money on developing apps. Retail partnerships and beacons may be ways to justify the cost and boost consumer engagement.

Earlier this month, Gatwick Airport, the second-busiest U.K. airport after Heathrow, installed 2,000 beacons to help travelers navigate through its gates, baggage claim and other facilities. The challenge with this strategy compared to what Houston is doing is that beacons require users to download an app. The beacons help to get more accurate personal coordinates on a smartphone’s GPS map, according to Media Post. It also plans to add an augmented reality (AR) feature that will help guide travelers through the airport, as well as talking to airlines about integrating the indoor navigation tool into their respective apps to push notifications like boarding alerts or flight schedule updates to travelers. Eventually, the technology will allow retailers and restaurants inside the airport to insert location-based ads into the smartphone view to promote special offers to visitors at Gatwick or Houston airports, TechCrunch reported.

S4M, société spécialisée dans le programmatique mobile, et la régie internationale Affinity Media

s’associent afin de proposer une nouvelle offre mettant en avant des campagnes mobiles géolocalisées en aéroport « enrichies en data comportementales et contextuelles », ont conjointement annoncé les deux sociétés. « Notre technologie permet de cibler des touristes et voyageurs d’affaires (…) déconnectées de leur environnement habituel », explique Stanislas Coignard, chargé de la stratégie chez S4M. Dans les faits, S4M utilise des identifiants uniques anonymes qui contiennent la coordonnée GPS et la langue du terminal de l’utilisateur, ainsi que le moment de la connexion. « Ces bassins d’audience représentent ainsi 30 millions de voyageurs uniques par semaine, dont 15,3 millions localisés en Europe et 1,8 million de personnes identifiées chaque semaine pour les seuls aéroports de Roissy et Orly », assurent-elles. Mais la technologie est également disponible pour les aéroports de London Heathrow, Frankfort, Rome, Zurich, Genève, New-York JFK, Atlanta, Tokyo ou encore Beijing International. S4M peut en outre proposer des « privates deals ».

source : http://tinyurl.com/hs6zr2p

SPOPOS is a system that tracks people and objects indoors. The system is being developed in Copenhagen Airport, Kastrup, Denmark. The development of SPOPOS involves testing out how passengers can be offered additional services during their stay in the airport by means of their mobile phone.

The airport is also using these studies to improve its ability to predict the build up of queues, and to ensure that passengers get to their plane on time.

Forgetting the boarding time?

Can’t find the boarding gate?

Where to buy a last minute soft drink?

Where is the nearest cosmetic shop?

All these questions could be answered by using an airport gadget developed by a Chinese company, Wuxi Chigoo Interactive Technology Co. Ltd. By using it, no worry again at airport.