Indoor Navigation for Developers Made Easy: Why We Built the IGC Nav Fusion Engine
IGC Nav grew from a challenge we encountered while building IGC Loyalty: standard indoor positioning tools often did not provide the accuracy we needed. That led us to build a Fusion Engine and turn improved navigation accuracy into a reusable SaaS layer for developers.
Indoor navigation has always looked simple from the outside: show a user where they are, point them toward a destination, and guide them there.
In practice, it is much harder.
When we began developing location-based experiences through IGC Loyalty, we quickly discovered that standard mobile positioning technologies were often not accurate enough for the type of indoor experience we wanted to create.
GPS works well outdoors, but once a user moves inside a shopping mall, hotel, airport, hospital, warehouse or multi-level building, accuracy can quickly become unreliable. A location error of several metres may be acceptable for outdoor maps, but indoors it can mean sending someone to the wrong shop, the wrong corridor, the wrong floor, or even the wrong side of a building.
That became the problem we wanted to solve.
Why IGC Loyalty needed better indoor accuracy
IGC Loyalty was originally designed around location-based engagement, including digital rewards, navigation and interactive experiences.
As the platform evolved, we wanted users to be able to move through real-world environments with much greater precision.
We found that relying on a single technology was not enough.
Traditional indoor navigation solutions often depend on infrastructure such as beacons, dedicated hardware, Wi-Fi positioning systems, pre-mapped layouts or other venue-specific installations. These solutions can work, but they may also introduce additional cost, deployment time and maintenance.
We saw an opportunity to approach the problem differently.
Instead of treating indoor positioning as one technology, we began developing a Fusion Engine designed to combine multiple available signals and correction methods into a more accurate navigation layer.
Building a Fusion Engine for more accurate indoor navigation
The idea behind the IGC Nav Fusion Engine is straightforward: no single sensor or positioning method is perfect, so the system should intelligently use multiple sources of information.
Depending on the device and environment, these may include motion sensors, positioning signals, visual reference points, elevation changes and other available data.
The objective is to continuously improve the estimated position rather than relying on one source alone.
This approach is designed to help improve:
- indoor positioning accuracy
- multi-floor navigation
- directional guidance
- arrival detection
- movement tracking
- location correction
- safety routing
- indoor and outdoor transition
For us, the challenge was no longer just about building navigation into IGC Loyalty.
We realised the navigation layer itself could become a product.
Accuracy as a Service
Once we began building the Fusion Engine, another opportunity became clear.
Thousands of developers are building apps that require location, positioning, routing or indoor navigation, but very few want to spend years developing their own sensor-fusion and positioning technology from scratch.
That is where IGC Nav comes in.
Our goal is to make indoor navigation for developers easier by providing navigation and positioning capabilities through reusable APIs.
Instead of rebuilding complex positioning logic, developers can integrate the IGC Nav platform and use the navigation layer as part of their own application.
Think of it as Accuracy as a Service.
Developers can focus on the experience they want to create, while IGC Nav provides the navigation infrastructure underneath.
Helping developers build navigation apps faster
The broader vision for IGC Nav is simple:
Build Apps Faster with Accurate SaaS Navigation.
We are developing IGC Nav as a reusable, API-driven platform that can support many different applications.
Potential use cases include:
- shopping mall navigation
- airport wayfinding
- hospital navigation
- warehouse navigation
- hotel and resort navigation
- retail store navigation
- emergency and safety routing
- asset and workforce navigation
- location-based games
- tourism applications
- accessibility applications
- smart building applications
Rather than building a separate navigation engine for every project, developers can connect to a common navigation infrastructure.
That means faster development, lower technical complexity and a much shorter path from idea to working application.
Why indoor navigation APIs matter
Indoor navigation is becoming increasingly important as apps move beyond simple outdoor GPS maps.
Developers now want to build experiences that understand:
- which floor a user is on
- which direction they are moving
- how close they are to a destination
- whether they have taken the wrong route
- when they have arrived
- how to guide them safely through complex indoor spaces
Building those capabilities independently can be difficult.
An indoor navigation API gives developers a way to access those capabilities without having to build the entire positioning stack themselves.
That is the problem IGC Nav is working to solve.
From IGC Loyalty to IGC Nav
IGC Nav grew directly from the challenges we encountered building IGC Loyalty.
We needed better indoor accuracy for our own platform.
But instead of solving the problem only for ourselves, we decided to build the technology as a reusable service that other developers could access as well.
The result is the IGC Nav Fusion Engine — a SaaS navigation layer designed to make accurate indoor and outdoor navigation easier to integrate into modern applications.
Our aim is simple:
Make advanced navigation infrastructure easier for developers to use.
And help the next generation of location-based applications get built faster.