Indoor localization: ready for primetime?

Indoor navigation and location tracking have been popular academic research topics in our community for more than a decade. This has lead to a vast amount of theoretical results, positioning techniques, and system prototypes that were developed in academia and industry research labs for efficient and accurate indoor localization and navigation. Marketplace adoption, however, has been slow -- products have largely focused on outdoor positioning and navigation. Only recently has the industry buzz and investment in indoor positioning and navigation products picked up. This panel will discuss whether indoor positioning solutions are finally ready for the marketplace. It will examine the limitations of the state of the art along dimensions such as precision, accuracy, energy consumption, complexity, and privacy and will debate in which areas, if any, further academic research is called for. The panelists will also discuss why adoption has been slow, whether any significant non-technical hurdles remain, and speculate which technical solutions are most likely to succeed.