Indoor positioning

Indoor positioning is the gap between a floor plan you read and a map that knows where you are. The blue dot attendees expect from Google Maps doesn't exist indoors by default — GPS dies at the hall entrance — so venues and organizers deploy positioning infrastructure to recreate it. The realistic use cases split by accuracy tier: hall-level positioning (which zone is the attendee in?) is cheap and reliable enough for movement analytics and zone-triggered notifications; stand-level blue-dot navigation demands dense infrastructure, per-venue calibration, and still degrades when ten thousand bodies attenuate the signals. For organizers, the honest commercial case is usually analytics first, navigation second: knowing how traffic actually flows between halls, where dwell time concentrates, and which entrances feed which aisles is planning data that changes next year's floor pricing. Attendee-facing navigation is the flashier pitch and the harder promise to keep. The common mistake is buying the blue-dot demo without asking what infrastructure the quoted accuracy assumed — a calibrated demo hall and your venue on show day are different environments. One honest nuance: positioning means tracking, and attendees increasingly notice. Location consent needs to be explicit, purpose needs stating plainly, and analytics should run on aggregated, anonymized movement — individual-level location trails are a privacy incident waiting for a subject-access request.