Would it be possible make Google maps aware of our beacons via their registry or api or something, so that google map can accurately give indoor direction to users in a facility that is under our control(where we can deploy beacons)?
Example: In a mall we own, can we place beacons and submit them to Google Maps so it can give better results?
Some links I found, but can't figure out an answer:
https://developers.google.com/beacons/
https://developers.google.com/beacons/proximity/guides
https://www.google.co.in/maps/about/partners/indoormaps/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.insight.surveyor
Google used to develop this beacon-based location service call Google Here but it was scrapped due to the reasons of privacy, but then you can do the following to get your beacons locationing up.
Let say you have multiple beacons in one mall.To make this explanation simple, just treat the indoor maps and normal maps as the same thing, and those beacons you going to add are like the places in the Google Maps.
First of all you need to make your building floor plan available on the Google Maps. You can do so by using the following steps to submit your beacons location with the floor maps of the building, so that your beacons location can be automatically align with your stores/building.
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/2803784?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
After your floor plans appear on Google Maps, you can submit your beacons location using the Map Marker tool (Retired March 2017, moved to Google Maps after that).
You can then use the Google Maps API's Map Object to work with your indoor map, including getting location of all your beacons.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/map#indoor_maps
The IndoorBuilding Object allows you to get the active level that you are accessing. You can use the function getLevels() to get all the levels in the building, and then use getActiveLevelIndex() to get active level you are working on.
After getting to the right floor, what is left is the interaction between Google Beacon API with the maps you created.
latLng and indoorLevel in the Proximity Beacon API would then return the exact location and detail level that your beacons located.
You can use this link to upload indoor map of a building.
https://maps.google.com/floorplans/find
Submit the details of floor and everything.
Hope it will help.
I believe there are no current plans to use registered beacons for directions indoors, or even for lat/long type location (more for semantic place inference), but I feel it is a very good FR so I went ahead and added it to the Android issue tracker:
Including support for BLE beacons in FusedLocationProvider.
Please star it to get updates.
As you can read in the other reply beacons can be used currently to improve indoor location accuracy for 3rd party apps, but it requires a lot of work by the developer and it is not supported by the Google Maps Mobile.
Related
Based on a address/location/place I would like to check if this place has a floor plan or not in google maps. Unfortunately in couldnt find anything in the Google Place API or any other API from google maps.
Only when this place has a floor plan, google maps is shown .
Any ideas how I check if floor plan for a place? Any help would be appreciated.
Regards,
Sal
The Indoor Maps are available in Google Maps Android API and iOS SDK , but not int he Google Maps API JS.
Please star this issue tracker FR to get notified when this gets implemented
There is no way to programatically check if a given location is "indoor enabled".
The closest you can to such a check is the getFocusedBuilding function which will get the current focused building or null if no building is focused (implying there is no indoor map)
Indoor maps
At high zoom levels, the map shows floor plans for indoor spaces such as airports, shopping malls, large retail stores, and transit stations. These floor plans, called indoor maps, are displayed for the 'normal' and 'satellite' map types (GoogleMap.MAP_TYPE_NORMAL and GoogleMap.MAP_TYPE_SATELLITE). They are automatically enabled when the user zooms in, and they fade away when the map is zoomed out.
Indoor maps (floor plans) are available in select locations. If floor plan data is not available for a building that you would like to highlight in your application, you can:
Add floor plans to Google Maps directly. This will make your floor plans available to all users of Google Maps.
Display a floor plan as a ground overlay or tile overlay on your map. This will enable only users of your application to view your floor plans.
Apologies up front - I'm not overly technical but helping a developer partner find an answer to a problem. Feel free to be as technical as you like in response though. I'll get him to look at the answers!
We're trying to pull the location (GPS coords) of the red pin dropped in the google maps app when you do a search (on iOS or android), to use in a separate app.
The key to this is that it pulls the info you've already searched for in google maps, NOT having to search again within the second app. i.e. using google maps API in the second app is off the table.
Options so far seem to be...
1) Run an intent to request the data in the background. However, it seems that the intent has to push coordinates to the gmaps app, and can't just "ask" the coordinates of the current pin.
2) Use the google maps API to allow the user of the second app to login to their account so it can pull the account Maps history (i.e. can see the most recent place in the search history). However, it seems that the google maps API doesn't give access to this data.
3)....??
We're stumped. Any ideas?
Thanks so much!
Have you considered using a Geocoder to get the coordinate data? It'll depend on your use case (when and how "red pins" are created), but you can circumvent using maps with it.
I am trying to make an application for windows phone 8 that could track current location of user and gives a route from current location to desired destination location.
With existing maps feature (bing, Nokia maps) it is not possible to track the location areas for Karachi Pakistan by their respective names. For example, if I want to get the route from pizza hut, Karachi to dolmen mall, Karachi, it will never show a route since the areas are not marked in the map.
This problem doesn't occur for people living in the US I suppose, since I saw many tutorials where exact locations are shown by just typing in the area names in the search bar (as for Redmond and Chicago). What should we, the users of elsewhere do.... while if we see Google maps, all areas even of Karachi, Pakistan are marked.
please help.
In Bing Maps, if you have two coordinates that are on roads that are drawn on Bing Maps you can get a route between them anywhere in the world. WP8 uses just Nokia data which is only one of several data providers used by Bing Maps. You can use the Bing Maps REST services to route between any two coordinates that are on roads in the world, including Pakistan. Here is some information about the Bing Maps REST routing service:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff701705.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819168.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj870778.aspx
Bing Maps are very powerful and easy to implement but unfortunately they are not supported in Pakistan. Due to restriction you are not able to find route between two geo location point or places. But Microsoft promised to give its support in Pakistan very soon as they are working on it as well.
The link given below will show you the restriction of bing maps in different regions.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj670541.aspx
I have written a blog post in which I have drawn a route between two location points but it will not work for you as I already told you.
http://dev-bingmaps.blogspot.com/
Now there is one solution in from which you can find route that is to use google maps.
I'm developing an iPhone app that uses a map and show direction between two points on the map, the problem is i cant use the Google maps because it does not support street naming in my country, so instead I'm using CloudMade maps.
The question is can i still query Google servers with direction requests and use the results on the CloudMade map? Is the Google license allows it?
According to Google's terms of service you cannot place any content obtained from Google's service on any other map without written permission from Google.
10.1.1
(g) No Use of Content without a Google Map. You must not use or
display the Content without a corresponding Google map, unless you are
explicitly permitted to do so in the Maps APIs Documentation, or
through written permission from Google. For example, you must not use
geocodes obtained through the Service except in conjunction with a
Google map, but you may display Street View imagery without a
corresponding Google map because the Maps APIs Documentation
explicitly permits you to do so.
I would contact Google, they may be able to work with you in your situation.
Update:
Google contact information is a bit sparse for free maps.
Here is a link to the permissions tool:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/permissions/geoguidelines.html
This is a link to Google Enterprise support:
http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/bin/answer.py?answer=142244#maps
Or you may want to try and contact a Google office in your country if one exists. I do not believe their legal department has a direct contact information for the public.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/corporate/company/address.html
An here is the Google premier sales contact information. I don't think you would need to obtain a premier license (they are expensive) with the information you provided about your app but the sales representative may be able to point you in the right direction.
http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/bin/request.py?contact_type=gme&utm_campaign=en-codepremier
I've started developing a small app which main goal is to draw a map using Google Maps API (v3), and to show business in the area drawn (bars, restaurants and so on).
I found the Google Places API that was supposed to be released this month but it hasn't been. As far as I know the point of that API is to offer results from the Google's database of business, so later we could put those business in the map.
However now I've found this sample which is using the AJAX Search API and Local Search Control for Google Maps to do the same thing.
So the question is, what is the point of the new Google Places API?
Thank you in advance!
The Places API returns a list of locations near a specific lat/lng, while the Local Search API allows for an arbitrary search of Google's database of business listings and other POIs.