Forget SatNav. It’s time for ReindeerNav.

As all of us unwrap our shiny new satnavs and GPS enabled phones at Christmas, it’s worth spending a few minutes thinking about how they got into our Christmas stockings?  Long before the days of GPS, Santa was out there delivering presents to all of the boys and girls who had been good without the benefit of a cluster of satellites to guide him.  Not only could he work out which house to deliver them to, but once he was down the chimney he knew which room each of us was sleeping in.

The old fairy tales never bothered with the technology behind all of this.  Santa just knew.  Even in a snow covered landscape he could recognise the house and who lived there.  Maybe it was his sense of smell, or that of his large–nosed reindeers, which were able to single us out by the individual aroma of sherry and mince pies we left out for them.  (I always harboured the find hope that those of us putting out home made mince pies and a decent amontillado might fare better than the cheapskates serving up last year’s left-over supermarket ones, but that’s another story.)

Because it’s a fairy story, we don’t bother about the fine detail like this.  But the reality is that nothing we have today in terms of location technology matches up to what we came to expect of our fictional creations.  Today’s GPS units might get Santa to the right location, but guiding him to the right room in an apartment block is a long way beyond any current indoor location technology. 

And it’s not just fictional creatures that have their own location abilities.  Birds, animals, fish and insects manage migrations with a similar absence of GPS receivers backed up with ARM processors.  We understand a little about how some of these mechanisms work, but in evolutionary terms we’re still groping at the unintelligent design end of location technology.

There’s a serious intent behind this post-prandial prattling, which is that location encompasses a lot more than throwing up a small collection of satellites.  Whilst I wouldn’t think of belittling the achievement of GPS, along with Glonass and Galileo, they’re only a crude first step.  We still need to develop an interoperable method for indoor location.  That’s going to be a different dimension.  You can count the number of positioning satellites up in space on the fingers of the diners around your Christmas table, and still have a quite a few digits to spare.   The current proposal for indoor location would require around one transmitter for every living being if we wanted to cover every room in every building.  That’s not an impossible number, but financing it will need some interesting business models.

It’s not just the cost of making and installing several billion sensors – it’s telling each one where it is and making sure that’s in a form that our phones or indoor location devices understand.  Which is where the opportunity for new sensors and intelligent software comes in.  Rather than needing every unit to be hand programmed with coordinates, it would make far more sense for them to learn from their surroundings.  I suspect that there might be some validity in looking to animals and fairy tales to inform our research in that area.  We might not end up using smell or asking Rudolf to tell us where we are, but there’s a lot more intelligence that we can put to use to map the world other than just coordinates.