
Google Maps Floor Plans - mshafrir
https://maps.google.com/help/maps/floorplans/
======
aubergene
Google are building various tools which allow users to contribute data
(especially to maps). However they don't provide an easy way for users to
choose to release their own contributions under an open license. I asked
Marissa Mayer this question at SXSW 2011 and she said they would change it,
however I haven't seen this happen. I would very much like to see Google
change their policy so that by default any user generated contributions are
released under a license which permits reuse without further permission from
Google.

My question is at 28:30
<http://audio.sxsw.com/2011/podcasts/GoogleMarrisaMayer.mp3>

~~~
aerosuch
Julian - just listened to your question from SXSW last year. I was part of
another discussion on indoor maps this year:
<http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP100110>

One of my fellow panelists from Google discussed ways for developers to use
Google's existing map tools to create their own indoor map content. This uses
the Google Maps slippy map API, but doesn't require the developer to submit
indoor map data to Google: [http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/map-
your-busin...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/map-your-
business-inside-and-out.html)

I would also like to see indoor map data, especially for public spaces, be
more freely (libre) available. There are a few contributors at OpenStreetMap
working on indoor maps, but privacy/data structure/data acquisition pose
significant challenges. I'm sure they'd be interested in your help!

~~~
7952
Just curious, but why exactly do you want indoor mapping? Is finding your way
around buildings really that problematic? What exactly is the point?

~~~
aerosuch
Yes, we can live without indoor maps, but we're suffering through a lot of
inefficiencies just because we don't know yet that there's a better option.

I want indoor maps because they can help reduce healthcare costs. It costs us
all money when people get lost in hospitals. While environmental signage
helps, it's often not sufficient. Visitors end up interrupting doctors and
nurses to ask for directions. This directly costs the hospital money (leads to
higher personnel costs), and leads to a poor customer experience (affects the
recovery process for patients and families). It is surprising how many people
get lost in hospitals: <http://twitter.com/lostinabuilding>

In addition to navigation, there are uses for facilities management, inventory
management, real estate sales, and analytics on how people use buildings. I'm
a big fan of using data to improve human efficiency, and these can help save
time/energy/money.

For retail environments, indoor maps present targeted advertising
opportunities, which can lead to more efficient advertising spending for
brands and retailers, and time savings for consumers. This is part of why
Google is so interested in indoor maps.

~~~
batista
_> I want indoor maps because they can help reduce healthcare costs. It costs
us all money when people get lost in hospitals._

Really? Like how much money? Seems like it needs a huge "citation needed"
sign.

------
flyt
A shame that all of this data is collected "free" for Google, then people are
made to pay to access it for their apps in the Maps API.

~~~
magicalist
There's two sides to this. There's the corporate/public-good argument, where
wikipedia is probably the best OSM analog, so it makes sense.

But there's also the user generated content argument, where there are plenty
of for profit companies that completely depend on content given for free by
their users (youtube, reddit, etc), where the users also benefit from having
better content on a site they visit and more attention to the content that
they post. From that way of looking at things, it makes perfect sense for
property owners to want to have their floor plans up on google maps.

In any case, I disagree that paying to access the maps API is necessarily
bad...any OSM host will also charge over any trivial amount of traffic because
none of them have the (free) infrastructure to handle it. I do agree with
other posters, though, that there should be Data Liberation Front coverage for
things like this and data contributed through map maker, and that it should
have been that way for years now.

~~~
aubergene
Imagine a large chain of shop sets aside an employee to upload the floor plans
for each of their stores. The company would probably find it beneficial if
they could download/make available the result of using the tool, so that if
they wished they could also make the floor plan available to other map
providers.

------
brudgers
In the US, "Blueprints" etc. are protected by copyright and the vast majority
are provided to building owners under very restricted usage rights which do
not anticipate such use.

The suggestion that people just upload them is somewhat problematic in so far
as it is akin to Napster's approach to music a decade ago.

~~~
abraham
The upload form clearly states _Make sure you have permission to use the floor
plan you are uploading._

~~~
brudgers
That's not the same as Google making sure Google has permission to use them.

Standard AIA contract language allows the owner to utilize the plans to
construct their project. The author (architect) retains copyright.

~~~
esrauch
IANAL but it seems to be that the layout of a particular existing building is
factual information and therefore cannot be copyrighted, just like the
location of streets cannot be copyrighted.

I guess it's slightly more hairy because architecture is considered to be
artistic as well as functional, whereas street layouts are generally only
considered to be functional, but I still think that would stand.

~~~
brudgers
In the US, architectural designs can be protected by copyright, but it is
uncommon.

On the other hand, architectural drawings(aka "blueprints") are automatically
protected by copyright as soon as they are published.

------
rdl
How long until someone uses these to make first person shooter game maps
automatically? (Using Google Maps outdoor mapping data for games is a great
idea, like the tower defense game from a couple days ago).

~~~
beaumartinez
Well, they'd have the plans, but what about room height, textures, furniture,
and other details?

~~~
electromagnetic
Why not take texture samples from the locational photos already provided. Even
if that was the only human interactive stage where the "designer" literally
only marks sections of images for the textures.

Ceiling heights can likely be extrapolated simply from photographs with the
right programming. Find a photo with 5 people in it and approximate the
building height from the peoples photographs.

I personally can approximate the height and width of a house simply by
counting bricks and shingles, because I work in construction I need to know if
my scaffolding poles or ladders will reach and you're lucky if you get a tape
measure to extend past 7ft without it buckling. (a sheet of shingles is 2ft
wide, so every 3 shingle tabs is 2 ft. A brick and mortar roughly make 4", so
3 courses of brick make roughly 1ft. vinyl siding is normally double 4.5",
double 5" or double 6" per sheet in height, one sheet is 12' long. Concrete
board is generally 3ft by 8" high. Aluminum is always 8" high, generally 12'
or 12.5' wide; If I can do this without a pencil and paper inside 30 seconds,
it shouldn't be difficult to make an algorithm to work this out.)

Extrapolating the interior of a building would likely be much harder, however
pictures of these often come with scale references (IE people), but as with
outside everything has to meet building codes and everything is made out of
standardized parts. However, one great clue is handrails. First floor railings
have to be a minimum of 36" high, second floor railings have to be a minimum
of 42" high (standard is 42" by code for commercial spaces, regardless of
height). Maximum 4" gap between vertical members, (generally made 4" on centre
as a precaution), and no horizontal members between 4" in height and 35" in
height as to make a railing climbable by a small child.

Turning a rendering of an entire mall level in a game into simply picking
colour swatches would be huge. Yes a pro studio is going to invest more time
in polish, but for the guy making an iPhone app and is never going to see a
huge return on the time he invests. Then accepting a bit of 'cookie cutter'
genericness in level design won't be a huge compromise if it's in a great
game.

The national building codes of countries would give you all the information
you need to extrapolate the size of rooms and buildings.

------
finalcut
I submitted four floors worth of plans for a building on our campus probably
close to two months ago; they are still "pending review"

There is no way to get feedback about the process and no indication on where
in the queue our submissions are.

There are probably 40 buildings on our campus that I was going to submit floor
plans for. However, I was using this first building as a guinea pig of sorts.
I can't imagine spending the time to get the other 39, multi-floor, buildings
aligned in their system if there is little likelihood they will ever end up in
the system for public consumption.

~~~
calwonderman
Finalcut23, Thanks for reaching out—and for your feedback.

Your problem is something we are very interested in. If you are interested in
solving this, please let me know by email at thomasdn@google.com.

Thanks again. Tom

------
Shamiq
Taking bets on the odds of this being disallowed for places where it would be
actually useful (for example: airports; municipal buildings; skyscrapers).

~~~
bonzoesc
The competition already has this for airports: <http://binged.it/HnKPqO>

Compare: <http://g.co/maps/8e9xp>

~~~
magicalist
which is weird, because in the android maps application, SFO is completely
filled in with a floor plan (and actually more detailed than the bing version,
which appears limited to coarsely positioned rectangles for sections of the
floor plan).

Is there some poor UI incantation you need to do to get this to appear on
google maps?

~~~
yellowbkpk
You might be able to see it if you turn on WebGL Maps on maps.google.com.

~~~
hsshah
Nope. Still Bing has a more detailed layout.

------
jamesmiller5
The view to align the map is very non-intuitive. It would be simply easier to
just pick where the map should overlay first and then fine tune the alignment.

~~~
rickyconnolly
agreed, the two-screen, three-point alignment system is finicky and needlessly
complex. All you need is pan, scale, and rotate functions to get the job done.
Much more intuitive.

~~~
jpk
What it's doing is setting ground control points that can be passed to a tool
like gdal_translate[1]. That three-point alignment deal is setting three pairs
of points made up of a lat,lng on the world, and an x,y on the image. Most
world map projections cause distortion that can't be compensated for with just
pan, scale, and rotate. The GCP jazz can.

But I'm in agreement, their UI to set the GCPs is terrible. :-P

[1] <http://www.gdal.org/gdal_translate.html>

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
> Most world map projections cause distortion that can't be compensated for
> with just pan, scale, and rotate.

Sort of. At the level of indoor floor plans, affine transformations are just
fine.

~~~
jpk
Good call. Looking into this further, looks like you're right.[1] For the
Mercator projection, translate, scale, and rotate are sufficient for the
georectification of small images (read: floorplans). You'd need more of the
affine toolbox if you used something like Mollweide (mostly sheer, right?),
and then you might need non-affine stuff to deal with crazier projections.

I guess, then, that begs the question of why the Google floorplan submission
UI uses that weird double-pane thing?

[1] [http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2011/03/24/tissot-s-
indica...](http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2011/03/24/tissot-s-indicatrix-
helps-illustrate-map-projection-distortion/)

------
tocomment
So it's only available in Google maps on Android, not on the iphone or on the
web?

If it's just for Android I'm not submitting my building.

~~~
aerosuch
While the technology for making indoor map content (georeferencing a floor
plan) is already widely available, most smartphones do a very poor job of
positioning themselves indoors. GPS doesn't work inside, leaving cell and wifi
trilateration as the most readily available alternatives.

Another likely factor for Google deploying on Android only is the ability to
use wifi signal strength data from the phone to do approximate indoor
positioning (the you-are-here "little blue dot"). Apple chose to lock
developers out of the API for reading wifi signal strength, which limits the
iPhone's ability to do indoor positioning (or show you nearby wifi routers).

In Apple's defense, the indoor positioning experience on Android does not meet
the high expectations that GPS has set for users. Instead of a precise little
blue dot, you get a 10-30m wide big blue circle. Some of the positioning
hardware announced from chipset makers like CSR and Broadcom may improve this
situation in the next generation of handsets.

~~~
gbog
I wonder why we couldn't use sound as a precise indoor positioning system.
Each position has a unique reverberation signature.

------
marcamillion
Ok.....now I see the Google Glasses coming together, and that video doesn't
seem as fanciful 'pie-in-the-sky' as I initially thought.

If Google is able to bring it all together, this could be pretty epic!

------
cwe
Why would this be Android only? Isn't there value at all in having this on a
full computer?

~~~
RobAtticus
Maybe, but they seem to be going for helping people find things in places like
malls and such. So instead of using a directory (which can sometimes be few
and far between), you find it on your phone. Also, you can probably sync with
your location so you have a real-time "You are here!" icon.

~~~
comex
This is not a particularly good reason to make it _Android_ only

------
mehmeta
If anyone's curious about an example, Mall of America is one of the locations
mapped with this feature, here's the Google blog post:
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-frontier-for-
goog...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-frontier-for-google-maps-
mapping.html)

It's a pretty interesting development for me to watch as the app I'm currently
working on named Mashupforge (<http://mashupforge.com>) lets people easily
create interactive maps out of image floorplans.

------
sakai
Does anyone have a link to a building with floor plans already uploaded? I'd
be curious to see how they've designed the interface but can't easily find
one... (i.e., in 2 minutes in downtown SF)

~~~
aubergene
Macy's New York, it appears flat in the web map, but works in Android,
although I found it to be quite useless when actually within the store.

[http://maps.google.com/?ll=40.750512,-73.988344&spn=0.00...](http://maps.google.com/?ll=40.750512,-73.988344&spn=0.003979,0.00825&hnear=PRINCE,+New+York+10012&t=m&z=18)

------
azelfrath
$1,000 says this will be featured in a heist movie in the next year. This is
exactly the kind of tech I used to scoff at when the uber-skilled hacker pulls
up a 3D map of the target building.

------
gee_totes
What's preventing people from uploading incorrect floor plans? Plus, with no
standard floor plan format, I don't see how this is useful, beyond showing
another helpful picture of a location.

~~~
zgohr
I actually see a benefit in uploading incorrect floor plans. A security
measure, if you will.

------
waterlesscloud
I wonder about copyright issues. Aren't the floorplans and directories in
malls and such copyrighted? Who has the right to upload them to Google?

~~~
jrockway
Theoretically, businesses have the right to upload their floor plans. And,
it's perfectly fine to draw your own and upload those.

~~~
brudgers
[IANAL] If they draw them themselves, yes they can do what they wish.

On the other hand, in the US, using the "blueprints" is probably going to be a
violation of the copyright of the design professional who prepared them.

Typical contract language restricts the Owner's use to "this project" and such
rights terminate "upon completion of this project." [AIA Document B105-2007]

 _Upon execution of this Agreement, the Architect grants to the Developer-
Builder a nonexclusive license to use the Architect’s instruments of service
solely and exclusively for purposes of constructing, using, maintaining,
altering and adding to the Project or the Development, provided that the
Developer-Builder substantially performs its obligations, including prompt
payment of all sums when due, under this Agreement_ [AIA Document B107 2010].

~~~
jrockway
Just like using AirBnB is against most apartment leases, and crossing the
street when the light is red is illegal. Welcome to a new age of civil
disobedience, where people freely carry around ice cream cones in their back
pockets on Sunday!

~~~
brudgers
That's quite a different claim from the rights based argument advanced
previously.

When it comes to Google, this isn't civil disobedience.

It's simply taking advantage of the fact that the copyrights it is interested
in ignoring are mostly held by many different people unlikely to have the
resources to enforce them vigorously.

BTW, it's Ice Cream Sandwiches Google wants everyone to carry.

------
cloudwalking
This will be very useful in airports. It would also be nice in supermarkets,
but that data would be tough to keep fresh.

~~~
ajross
Which is why they're trying to crowd source the maintainership: the idea is
that airports and giant retail stores will have a built-in incentive to keep
their maps updated. And it might be true.

But I'm a little mixed on this. Google maps, while great and useful, isn't an
open source project. The data is closed and proprietary and not useful to the
community at large. I'd much rather this be done under the umbrella of OSM or
the like, or if nothing else published as a separate data set subject to open
licensing.

~~~
pagekalisedown
Retail stores are optimized to make you spend the most on each visit. That's
why necessities are in the back and far apart from each other.

A floor plan goes against the self interest of the store.

~~~
ajross
A fair point, but it's only true in isolation. If they're in competition with
another equally-well-stocked chain that has floorplans, then customers might
prefer to shop at the niftier, more modern place with the fun maps. Note that
big department stores have always had maps available at the entrance, it's not
like they're inherently opposed to the practice.

------
cies
See:

<http://floorplanner.com>

They are a startup from my town (Rotterdam) and have been doing online
floorplans longer then anyone else.

------
hsshah
This nicely correlated to their Project Glass demo where the guy asks for
directions 'inside' the book store. To turn that into a reality, Google will
certainly have to crowdsource this info.

------
kenrikm
They are directly targeting the market that Point Inside is in. I'm curious
why they did not just purchase them rather than building something that will
need to gain traction?

~~~
aerosuch
Different business model? Google caters to highest-bidder advertisers.
PointInside works more directly with building owners, like retailers:

[http://www.pointinside.com/blog/2011/12/what-google-
indoor-m...](http://www.pointinside.com/blog/2011/12/what-google-indoor-maps-
really-mean-for-retailers/)

------
djrconcepts
I think it will be great to be able to navigate complex public locations such
as shopping malls, casinos, college campuses, hospitals, etc..

------
dan85
Does the GPS work indoors?

~~~
cwiz
No. There are ways to do indoor positioning indoors: WiFi fingerprinting and
supersonic marks.

Triangulation (trilateration) the way it's used in GPS will not work indoors
because it's impossible to build accurate signal propagation model – model
would be extremely complicated.

On the other hand signal propagation model can be learned via sampling actual
signals in different spots on site. There are two ways to sample signals: 1)
direct 2) indirect (via statistical models like SLAM)

Positioning can be done by comparing signal strengths from model and actual
device and feeding them to some statistical positioning algorithm like
particle filter or LSE. These algorithms use not only signal strengths but
accelerometer, gyro and magnetic sensors for movement model. Fingerprinting
techniques can provide up to 30 cm accuracy.

Huge win of WiFi fingerprinting is that it works on existing consumer-level
hardware. But the downside is that you cannot scan WiFi in iOS public API.

There is less accurate way to position user indoors using supersonic marks –
and it works on any existing phone.

Companies who do indoor positioning: WiFiSlam, Qubulus, WalkBase, Google,
Nokia and we (applying to yc :). Some provide APIs, some are in stealth mode
and Google has indoor positioning in some US and Japanese malls and airports.

Personally I think that there is huge opportunity for location-aware apps for
malls, airports, parking lots, hospitals, etc and it has not been tackled much
by anyone yet.

------
zupreme
Most large retail outlets will probably opt out of this initiative. A big part
of their revenue model hinges on the "impulse buying" which occurs as you
wander throughout the store looking for your items. There is a reason why no
major department or grocery chain (that I am aware of) has a store directory
at the front like most malls do.

However, if crowdsourcing is allowed this could become major. I and 20 other
people could all map out the Walmart (for example), upload the data, and then
whatever matches in 80% of the submissions would become part of the "map".

If enough people did that it would almost force the major chains to
participate, if for no other reason than to maintain control of their maps.

~~~
jrockway
This is probably only partially true. If the goal was really to confuse you,
they would not put related products near each other (the cheese would be with
the bananas, the milk would be with the dishwasher detergent, etc.) They would
also rearrange the store every week, so that you wouldn't be able to learn
where items are.

Honestly, I've never seen stores arranged for impulse buying except to have
certain items promoted above others. Eye-level shelves, displays at the front
of aisles, etc. Otherwise, the fruits and vegetables are together, the canned
items are together, the milk and cheese are together, etc. Pretty much every
grocery store I've ever been in has been laid out in approximately the same
way.

So I'm worried that you may be propagating an urban legend.

~~~
zupreme
Jon,

Thanks for the interesting perspective. I've actually opened, run, and sold a
retail store before (mobile phones and accessories) so, while the type of
layout logic I referred to in my comment above did not apply to my store
(because it wasn't large enough) I did read ALOT on the subject and was part
of the local Chamber of Commerce so I can assure you that impulse buying
considerations are a big part of why stores get laid out the way they do.

There are even consulting firms that make a tidy income by advising stores on
product placements within the store for maximum sales.

~~~
jrockway
Sure, but how does a map defeat the measures stores take to get you to buy
impulse items. If you want to buy milk, there are two possibilities. The first
is, you know exactly which brand of milk you want to buy, and you will seek it
out explicitly. Or, you don't care, and will pick whatever's easiest. That's
the area for optimization: pick the highest profit milk and make it the first
one the doesn't-care-about-milk consumer sees. Put lots of impulse items on
the way to the milk. And so on. A map on the phone does nothing to prevent
impulse buys.

On the other hand, why even bother going to your store when groceries can be
ordered online and delivered? Then you don't need a map at all.

