[TechJapan] At the “ITS World Conference Aichi/Nagoya 2004,” KDDI and NEC held a demonstration of a 3D pedestrian navigation system. The demonstration was held in the “Oasis 21″ underground shopping center, which is close to the Nagoya Art and Culture Center, where the opening ceremonies of the conference were held.

The demonstration was of a pedestrian navigation option that can operate where there cannot be GPS signals – such as in underground shopping centers or inside buildings. Not only movement along a particular plane, but since the technology also supports movement from floor to floor, it is said to be 3D navigation. At the demonstration, NEC-made transmission instruments called “InfoSigns” were placed at a couple of tens of meters inside the underground shopping mall, which would provide inputs such as latitude, longitude, and “what floor.” When an A5504T phone with Bluetooth ran a specific BREW appli, it would read the position information from the InfoSigns using Bluetooth, then in turn download map data based on that information using the CDMA packet network. While on the typical EZ Navi Walker Application, the position information is trasmitted from a GPS satellite, this demonstration used InfoSigns every 20 meters or so that would provide position information instead of GPS. As these InfoSigns’ only purpose is to transmit position information to cellular phone using Bluetooth, there need not be any special preparations for connecting to some specific network; they can be setup by just plugging them in. The means that costs can be reduced when deploying these over a large area.