A map generated with Real Earth’s STENCIL.
Real Earth
Real Earth, for instance, just won first place in Microsoft’s Indoor Localization Competition in Vienna, Austria using the SLAM algorithm they coded into their STENCIL handheld mapper.
According to their release from the competition, they did it with style, too, being the only solution to perform real-time indoor localization without the use of “infrastructure.” In this case that means they located 15 markers in a large facility in 15 minutes, all without the use of any external sensors. As compared to a scan of the facility taken with a static scanner, the STENCIL showed a 0.16 m average error.
That makes it accurate enough for some uses, but not others. Still, that accuracy is nothing to sneeze at for a device you turn on with one button and carry around like an ice-cream cone–and it makes the STENCIL another viable tool in the 3D toolbox.