I am looking at options for implementing Indoor Positioning System in a Windows Phone 7 app. This app is going to be used to guide users inside shopping malls, so location accuracy up to a few meters is very important. I googled a bit and came across Redpin – http://redpin.org which looks good but they don’t have a ready client for Windows Phone 7 yet. Redpin only supports iOS and Android as of now.
Can anyone here help with this? Has anybody here implemented Indoor Positioning System on Windows Phone 7 app?
Windows Phone 7 does not provide enough information to be able to produce such a system without a very specific WiFi infrastructure.
To implement such a solution you would need to be able to access information about connected (or available) WiFi networks or access points and the signal strength of each. From these you could triangulate an approximate location.
However,
As the WP7 SDK does not provide information on an access point name or signal strength this becomes very difficult.
The only ways round this would be to identify a location by network name, assuming that each access point used a different name, so as to provide greater accuracy.
Or you had a proxy on the access points that could add additional location information to the request, so as to provide a greater level of accuracy without needing to create lots of uniquely named networks.
Either way would be a hack and be unlikely to produce the level of accuracy needed for your requirements. Unless you know you have the number of users with appropriate devices to justify creating such a system on WP7 at the moment I’d advise against this for now and hope that additional, required, functionality becomes available in a future version of the platform.