Indoor positioning projects in retail are now popping up around the globe.

Indoor positioning is the next revolution that is set to reshape the world of retail. Be it Osram, Philips, GE or Zumtobel all the major players in the lighting world are developing their own interior navigation systems, that utilise bluetooth chips planted in lights or visible light communication (VLC) to send directional information to shoppers smart phones. The apps can then direct shoppers to special offers or products that particularly interest the shopper in question.

New indoor positioning projects in retail are now popping up around the globe and the initial results from these are often quite impressive. Here are Lux’s top ten indoor positioning projects that you need to know about.

10) Ginza Six Mall – Tokyo

StepInside, an indoor positioning system developed by Senion is being installed, which will show patrons the quickest route to a store via a smartphone app.

The mall is expecting up to 20 million people to visit the store every year, many of whom will be tourists unfamiliar with the sites layout.

The building’s management will use the data collected by the app to better understand the behaviour of visitors, helping authorities to develop better traffic flow management systems when the store opens.

9) CapitaLand Mall – Singapore

The CapitalLand Mall in Singapore is installing a Philips VLC based indoor positioning system.

Users are required to install an app on their smartphone and then allow the camera on their phone to pick up a light frequency emanating from the Philips lights installed around the mall.

The shopper’s location in the mall is then identified and directions are given, depending on where abouts in the estate the shopper wants to go. Retailers are also able to use the app to send out targeted marketing messages to shoppers.

8)E.Leclerc – Langon

Zumtobel joined forces with E.Leclerc Langon, a hypermarket in France, to launch an indoor positioning, smart parking and mobile push marketing app.

The existing lighting infrastructure has been adapted to offer the serrvices, by fitting the luminaries with sensors.

The Bluetooth beacons allows customer to locate their position and allows E.Leclerc Langon to send real-time push messages with customised offers, based on the customers current location in the store.

In the car park, the app can help a customer to locate available parking spots, or even find their way back to their car when they have finished shopping.
7) Tai Po Mega Mall – Hong Kong

Google has invested in several indoor location companies and the firm believes that that in time indoor positioning will be bigger than GPS, simply because people spend the great majority of their time indoors.

Google has created indoor maps of stores like the Tai Po Mega Mall in Hong Kong and other major worldwide retail destinations in preparation for the launch of the company’s head-mounted computer ‘Glass’ which will allow people to see directional arrows through glasses.

Although it is still early days, there is the potential for Bluetooth chips embedded in light fittings to be able to provide information to feed Google Glass in the future.

6) Carrefour – Lille

Carrefour in Lille steer shoppers straight to discounts via the lights in the shop ceiling.

The €84 billion ($93.4 billion) retailer transmits digital information from LED lamps to customers’ smartphones via VLC provided by Philips. The system uses 800 programmable Philips LEDs.

VLC is able to encodes lightwaves with data about products and promotions, and transmits the information straight to the camera on a shoppers’ smartphone.

An app then displays the directional information, which helps to guide the consumer to the product’s location in the sprawling store.

5) Walmart – US-wide

Walmart is thought to be trialling Acuity Brands indoor positioning technology.

Acuity Brands claims that it has now deployed lighting-based indoor positioning systems (IPS) in swathes of retail space across the US.

Acuity Brands is thought to be developing indoor positioning products in conjunction with Microsoft.

The two companies are developing products that utilise lighting to communicating information to to shoppers smartphones.

Data the app collects is then sent to Microsoft’s Azure cloud system to allowing retailers to discern useful retail patterns and insights.

4) Aswaaq – Dubai

UAE supermarket chain Aswaaq became the first retailer in the Middle East to install connected lighting which communicates with its customers.

Its Dubai branch boasts a VLC based indoor positioning system, which allows shoppers to find items in the store to an accuracy of 30cm.

Smart-phone owners must first download the Aswaaq-branded app, which allows their phone to communicate with the individual light points transmitting their location through the high-frequency modulation of the light.

The data stream is one-way and no personal data is collected by the lighting system.

3) Target – US wide

American retail giant Target uses LED ceiling lights to track in-shop customers and guide them to relevant products via their smartphones.

The system is widespread and has been placed in nearly 100 Target stores.

The $73 billion chain told Lux that the scheme uses wireless signals that travel between LED lights and shoppers’ Android gadgets to spread directions and information related to products and special offers.

The 100 location deployment marks the largest known deployment of indoor positioning by any retailer to date and offers a good sign that the system can work and be worthwhile on a wide scale.

2) EDEKA Paschmann – Düsseldorf 

An EDEKA Paschmann supermarket in Düsseldorf became the first store in Germany to benefit from the new Philips’ indoor positioning system earlier in the year.

In collaboration with Favendo, Philips has developed a new smartphone app that gives shoppers access to location-based services, helping them to find items in the store, down to an accuracy of 30cm.

A range of newly introduced downlights and spotlights have been installed in the store, which are compatible with the Philips way-finding technology.

As well as providing location services and in-pocket notifications about discounts, the technology can also be used to collect data about where are the busiest areas in stores and analyse the routes customers take to find products. This allows retailers to make better decisions when it comes to store layout and marketing.

The Philips Lighting Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons, which allow the location system to work, are easy to integrate as they come with multiple powering options ranging from full integration into luminaires to track-mounted beacons.
1) Marc O’Polo – Switzerland-wide

The indoor positioning system installed as part of a trial in Marc O’Polo stores in Switzerland saw the average value of purchases made by customers rise by 10 per cent, the best evidence to date that indoor positioning could well revolutionise retail.

Osram Einstone technology was commissioned by the Bollag-Guggenheim Fashion Group to try and improve customer loyalty, whilst increasing the chances that customers would purchase products. The company wanted to develop a mobile phone app that would serve as a digital customer loyalty card, which would offer discounts and special offers locally using indoor positioning technology powered by the lights.

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In France’s Carrefour supermarket, visible light communication is used to transmit information to visitor’s smartphones.

Philips appears to be particularly interested in Luciom’s potential to improve Li-Fi in several ways, including speed, coding, decoding, and reliability.

Lux reveals that Philips Lighting, in a surprise move, is set to invest in Li-Fi, news that will bring credibility to the fledgling technology.

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Scientist who discovered human centric lighting shares tips with Lux. PLUS: Lighting based indoor positioning set to revolutionise US stores. AND: Health fears makes city think twice about LED. Lux Today 24 January 2017

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Scottish start-up creates first ever Li-fi office in Paris. PLUS The German rail network installs one million luminaires to cut energy use by 25 percent. AND The American Medical Association warns that outdoor LEDs may damage health. Lux Today 28 June 2016. 

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Continued testing on LiFi capabilities are in train prior to a long-anticipated roll-out of the system in Paris Metro stations.

A French firm has won the contract to supply internet-over-lighting technology on the Paris Metro.

The ambitious project – which will allow over two million daily commuters to use lights as a form of Wi-fi, dubbed ‘Li-fi’ – now looks firmly on track. Already La Defense station has been successfully equipped with the tech.

Paris-based Oledcomm, a spin-off of the University of Versailles, won the contract from RAPT to initially supply Li-fi installations in 66 stations across Paris, involving over 250,000 LED luminaires.

The award of the contract by RATP follows an extensive series of test phases before the roll-out goes ahead. The first phase of the work involved a series of evaluations to prove the concept. This work was done in a so-called Fab Lab environment, community-based workshops where entrepreneurs, students, small businesses come together to develop technology.

The system needed to demonstrate that it could deliver on its core promises of a Li-fi installation, especially on four key criteria:

• The Li-fi can operate within a complex physical environment
• The system can provide the bi-directional communications needed for a secure internet connection
• Traffic and security information can be ‘pushed’ to smart phones as necessary
• A system of audio-messaging could be developed to enable tourists and people with impaired sight to be guided around the tunnels and concourses of an underground station

The Fab Lab process also presented commercial opportunities to other entrepreneurial groups to use the open-source nature of the system to develop apps that could work alongside the core Li-fi service.

Having successfully completed the test-house phase, the next phase of the contract moved into the real world with an installation of Li-fi-enabled LED luminaires at the Metro station at La Defense.

Chosen for its complexity, La Defense provides all of the real-life difficulties that a Li-fi installation will need to overcome if it’s to prove its worth to the transport system operators.

Once all of the testing has been successfully completed and RATP is confident of the platform, it’s expected that Paris will become the first public transportation system in world with Li-fi connectivity.

Oledcomm, formed in  in 2005, installed its first public Li-fi project at the Musee Curtius in Liege in 2012. Since then, the company has gone on to install systems in offices, hospitals, retail stores as well as public street lighting.

Li-fi works by making invisible modulations to the light from a luminaire – invisible to the human eye, but not to the camera on a smartphone, tablet or laptop. The same technology lies behind the positioning systems being used by retailers such as Carrefour and Target, but here it is being used to send data, rather than just to pinpoint someone’s position. Proponents of Li-fi say that it will add enormous capacity to wireless communications, because the visible light spectrum is 10,000 times larger than the radio frequency spectrum that Wi-fi uses. Some also note that it will operate much faster than Wi-fi, and that it will be useful in electromagnetic sensitive areas like hospital, airplanes and nuclear power plants.

It’s currently not clear how devices will communicate back to the lighting on the Paris Metro installation. However, it is relatively straightforward to use different wavelengths for each link direction, i.e., visible light in the downlink (to also serve as illumination) and infrared or even standard Wi-fi in the uplink.

On the downside, Li-Fi signals do not travel as far as Wi-Fi signals do.

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Lux reports: A tech revolution is happening in lighting – and the speed of development is blistering. Here we identify the biggest trends you need to know about. And a few are rather surprising….

1 Indoor location tracking

The latest tech uses lights in conjunction with smart phones to accurately locate people with 10cm accuracy within an indoor space. Once the building owner knows where you are, they can interact with you to deliver real time marketing messages or offer better services, or perhaps they’ll just track what you do and figure out how to use the data.

Who to watch: Acuity Brands, Philips

2 Camera-based lighting control

Lighting controls today typically use infrared, ultrasonic or microwave sensors to detect movement, which means they are liable to false triggering or switching prematurely when people aren’t moving. Camera technology is so cheap (you probably have two in your smart phone) that they are now being used in lighting control.

Who to watch: EWO, Zumtobel, Steinel, Hubbell

3 Self-learning control systems

The concept of a device learning its own settings has been pioneered by Google’s acclaimed Nest Labs in its thermostats. The concept lends itself perfectly to lighting controls so that sector is examining how the approach can be adopted to enable the system to self-commission and learn how a space is being used over time.

Who to watch: Helvar

4 Super capacitors

The Achilles’ heel of emergency lighting is batteries, which degrade over time. However, the improvements in efficiency of LEDs and advancing capacitor technology mean it is possible to get an hour of lighting back-up without batteries. This means that emergency lighting can have a maintenance free life of up to 10 years.

Who to watch: Teknoware, Ledo

5 Integrated street lights

Street lights or rather the columns which hold them off the ground used to be a convenient place for dogs to use as toilets, now they’re being crammed full or other technology from CCTV systems, PA speakers, Wifi transmitters and electric car charging points. This reduces street clutter and could provide funding streams for public lighting.

Who to watch: Schreder, Hess, Philips

6 Inductive power coupling

Although this technology has been around for years – it’s used to charge your electric toothbrush – manufacturers are now exploring ways in which it can used for lighting. It’s a perfect way to install an unground uplight and avoid the age old issue of water ingress, or connect a retail lighting display to power without wires.

Who to watch: Auraled, Design LED Products

7 DC power networks

The battle of the currents was settled in favour of AC back in the 1890s, but LEDs and a proliferation of low-power devices mean Round Two has started. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is one embodiment bundled up as part of a computer network, but we’ve also seen DC-powered track lighting, which results in smaller fixtures.

Who to watch: Cisco, Zumtobel

8 Lights which aren’t just lights

With sensors becoming so cheap, and lights getting connected to the Internet, light fixtures are starting to get packed out with sensors not related to lighting, such as ambient temperature and air quality.  That data can be shared with other building services or harvested for other big data applications.

Who to watch: Gooee, Sensity Systems, Acuity Brands

9 Miniaturisation

Everything in lighting is starting to shrink dramatically. Think chip-scale LED arrays, compact optical systems and ultra thin LED drivers (the smallest we’ve seen is just 13mm high). This should result in ultra-small downlights, in-ground uprights and super-slim linear fixtures, and lower materials costs for the manufacturer.

Who to watch: Lumileds, Samsung, Osram, iGuzzini

10 Li-Fi

Wi-fi over lighting, or Li-Fi to give it the name coined by inventor Harold Haas, can transmit data 100 times faster than wifi by modulating the light, which would mean you could download the entire set of Star Wars movies in around one second. It works by pulsing the LED light at extremely high frequencies which is undetectable to the human eye.

Who to watch: PureLifi, Toshiba

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A looming skills shortage could derail the revolution in connected lighting – unless action is taken to train a generation of contractors. PLUS: Customer who spent $150 million on lighting says pace of technological development is ‘overwhelming’. Lux Today webcast for May 17 2016 with Courtney Ferguson.

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