In these last few months, we’ve made great progress on several fronts. Read the detail here!
Wayfinding news
Create & publish a wayfinding mobile app in a matter of minutes
Situm wayfinding solutions allow developers to build positioning & wayfinding apps from scratch, or integrate wayfinding capabilities into existing ones. If you have an app, and you have development capabilities (either in-house or external), supercharging your app with wayfinding is a no-brainer.
But… many times, our clients face a challenge: they want to provide wayfinding for their visitors, but they don’t have an app! This also happens to some of our partners. Building a new app for your business may seem a daunting task, but it’s not: over the years, we’ve helped clients & partners to get started creating their own apps.
Now, we’ve taken this philosophy one step further. We’ve created a basic wayfinding app that works both on Android & iOS devices. Not only that: we’ve released the code as open-source, so any developer can use it to build a new wayfinding app in a few minutes. You may change the app’s name, colours & logos and much more. Not only that, any developer can expand the app with other functionalities, whichever they are.
Situm WYF: a pleasant & modern indoor navigation UX
Situm WYF is a plug-and-play UX component that allows you to bring wayfinding capabilities to your apps in no time. Essentially, you just have to import the module in your code and you will get a full feature indoor navigation interface out of the box, including cartography visualization, a POI search directory, indoor & outdoor geolocation, turn-by-turn navigation, etc.
During the past few months, we have been working hard to improve the capabilities of Situm WYF. You can review the full changelog (Android, iOS), but in essence:
- We’ve redesigned the whole interface (with a more modern look).
- We’ve increased the capabilities to customize the look & feel. For instance, now you’ll be able to adapt the colour of wayfinding routes and the positioning icon, among other customizations available.
- Now the developer can modify and interact with the WYF module programmatically. This includes, among others: 1) more callbacks to receive events such as when the user changes floors or clicks on a POI, 2) the ability to start the module in wayfinding mode (the route is automatically computed without any user interaction), 3) ability to centre the camera view around a certain POI, 4) ability to start/stop positioning programmatically (previous versions only allowed the user to do it by interacting with the interface).
- When in navigation, a new menu shows the remaining distance and estimated time of arrival.
- Now the WYF module allows showing webviews along or on top of module components. This is important so developers can overlay their own widgets (e.g. a customized footer or their own POI search bar).
Situm loves hybrid apps: introducing Capacitor support
Our WYF module is now compatible with Capacitor 3 for mobile apps. Capacitor is an hybrid framework that allows you to create mobile & web apps in Javascript, compatible with technologies such as Angular, Vue, Ionic, React…
With Situm WYF Capacitor, you’ll be able to create two wayfinding apps at once: one for Android, one for iOS. Situm WYF Capacitor implements all the nice features of Situm WYF native for Android & iOS. You get the best of both worlds: the speed of native WYF with the broad compatibility & developer productivity of hybrid platforms.
If you’re interested, you can read more here.
Maps news
Embed indoor maps easily in websites & kiosks with our Javascript SDKs & Map Widgets
Situm is indoor positioning, but it’s also indoor maps and geoanalytics. Until now, if you wanted to integrate this data in your web app or 3rd party platforms, you could use our REST API.
In order to make things easier for you, we’ve released a Javascript SDK and an indoor maps widget that is easily integrable into webpages & digital kiosks.
With our Javascript SDK, you’ll be able to build geospatial web applications leveraging Situm cartography without much effort: from showing the floorplans of your building on a digital kiosk to retrieving geospatial data in real-time.
To make things even easier for you, we’ve created a ready-to-integrate web widget with which you will be able to show the floorplans of your building & let users search for their favourite POIs with just a few lines of code.
Tiles & Vector Maps: interactivity, high resolution, 3D views & more
Situm is not only indoor positioning. It’s also wayfinding, geoanalytics and indoor maps. Up to now, our mapping capabilities were limited to PNG/JPG images (raster) of ~4000x4000px, which was enough for most buildings, but not for huge ones (where this resolution did not allow us to represent the environment with the detail we’d like).
This year, we’re improving our mapping capabilities. In this regard:
- We support raster tiles, so the resolution limitation is no longer a problem. We are able now to represent any huge building with the resolution it deserves.
- We’re working on providing support for vector formats, such as GeoJSON and IMDF. We’re confident this will allow us to achieve a greater representation detail, as well as other cool features such as interactive and 3D maps.
If you are interested in these kinds of maps, please let us know. We just need the original maps (e.g. a CAD file or a high-resolution image) and we will take care of the rest.
Geoanalytics News
New report: Visit & stay times per geofence
We’ve improved our geofencing reports, now called “Visit and stay time reports” (some people call these “dwell times”). As always, you will be able to retrieve the accumulated time each user spends in each geofence (and the total time spent by all users per geofence).
Additionally, we have included in this report the ability to view the number of visits users pay to each geofence (we add a visit every time a user enters a geofence), and a breakdown of all geofence visits, specifying the entrance/exit times, the user and the total visit time.
Create your own BI dashboards: we support PowerBI!
We’ve published a bunch of Reporting APIs, such as heatmaps, stay-in-geofence, number of visitors, trajectories… We’ve added support both for CSV and JSON format, which will allow you to easily integrate these analytics within your own software, but also with Business Intelligence tools.
To demonstrate this capability, we’ve written a blog post where we show how to create & connect your own PowerBI dashboard with Situm. We’ve prepared a sample template, that you can download from the blog post or from the Reports section of Situm Dashboard, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
We’ve also helped some companies to create their own dashboards, so please let us know if we can help you set yours up.
Other news
Filtering hotspots & undesired WiFi MACs
When you calibrate, you may capture WiFi signals that should not be used. Therefore, sometimes you will need to filter out some specific WiFi Access Points (or a group of them) in order to achieve good results.
To help you out, we have introduced new features that will help you filter hotspots, specific MAC addresses & groups of WiFi APs. If you’re interested, check the documentation here.
Remote configuration in iOS, Cordova, Capacitor & React Native
As you may know, a few months back we introduced a new feature in Situm Android SDK: Remote Configuration. This feature allows you to configure positioning parameters (such as using / not using WiFi or BLE, for example) remotely (over the air), from Situm Dashboard, without having to recompile your app.
This feature has been a great success, so we’ve extended Remote Configuration support to all the SDKs. In 2022, we plan to enhance this feature with more configurations available, such as those related to routing & wayfinding indications.