Forget WiFiSlam — ByteLight uses LEDs for indoor positioning

Satellite navigation has been one of the most important technological advances of the last 50 years. No matter how good the systems get, they still don’t work where we spend the majority of our time: the great indoors. Tools have been devised that cleverly use WiFi triangulation and “hybrid” GPS (say, GPS coordinates combined with sensor data from a compass, pedometer, and accelerometer), but these are inaccurate and generally unreliable. A company called ByteLight is trying to change this situation with a system that uses LED lighting to provide devices with accurate location data.