IndoorAtlas supports Outdoor-Indoor-Outdoor transitions out of the box. However, to get the best possible performance in various circumstances, there are a few things to consider.
One of the most important things is that the GPS or mobile platform's standard location is not always accurate. Thus, when you approach a venue with positioning shown on a map, it may not be accurate until you enter the indoors and and start using the IndoorAtlas positioning.
Even more so, when you navigate out from a venue and transition from accurate IndoorAtlas positioning to outdoors GPS/platform position provider, the position may jump to e.g. 100m away from the door where you exited the venue.
The above image shows a simple scenario with a single building. As you can see, the relevant events from IndoorAtlas SDK are:
1) Enter venue event: this is triggered when the user within the vicinity of the venue (roughly within a few hundred meters from the venue)
2) Enter floor plan: this is triggered when the user comes to the fingerprinted indoor area.
Read more about how to perform outdoor fingerprinting to enable outdoor-indoor-outdoor transitions.
Venues with Multiple Buildings
However, often the customer's venue has several buildings and indoor positioning is deployed to each of them. To enable navigation between the venues, the recommended way to setup Venues and Floors in IndoorAtlas in this scenario is:
- Use just one venue and use separate a floor plan per each venue and each floor.
- IndoorAtlas Wayfinding supports routing/wayfinding between buildings, if you use a single Venue in IndoorAtlas to cover those. In this case, IndoorAtlas enables drawing wayfinding graph outdoors between the ground level floor plans of each venue.
If buildings are close to each other (<50 m), you can add outdoor area as a separate outdoor floor plan on ground level, including all buildings. Then fingerprint the main walk paths between the buildings on that floor plan.
To ensure good outdoor performance and outdoor-indoor-outdoor performance in bad GPS environments (usual between high buildings), you can install beacons on the main walkways between buildings (outdoors or indoors) and fingerprint the walkways. Note that you can do this as the last step of deployment if performance is not good between venues.