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Grab rolls out indoor navigation feature
The feature is targeted at newcomers, particularly tourists, to help them navigate unfamiliar compounds around the city.
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A Grab driver (left) and Go-Jek driver (right) pick up orders from a fried chicken restaurant in West Jakarta. (JP/Norman Harsono)
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ide-hailing app Grab Indonesia has rolled out a “Venues” feature to help passengers navigate their way to predesignated pick-up points within large compounds, including shopping malls, airports, major train stations and major tourist sites in Greater Jakarta.
Ariek Wibisono, head of mapping operations at Grab Indonesia, told reporters in Jakarta on Tuesday that the feature was targeted at newcomers, particularly tourists, to help them navigate unfamiliar compounds around the city.
The feature, he continued, would soon be directly imbedded into the ride ordering process instead of being accessed from a separate widget.
“We’ll start rolling out the feature with 10 percent of all Grab users in Greater Jakarta, then aim for 100 percent by the end of this month,” he said.
The company said in a statement that the feature was currently available at 600 locations around Southeast Asia, half of which were located in Greater Jakarta, and that it planned to have 10,000 locations by year-end.
Nagur Hassan Mohammad, regional program manager of maps at Grab, said the mapping was done by a team of 90 mapping operators, who manually went around the city taking pictures and writing the directions.
The company did use a third-party map when it began the project in early January but found a myriad of mislabeled locations because it was heavily crowd-sourced and thus, chose a slower but better quality-controlled method.
“Our biggest challenge now is locating the users’ position inside the compound. Thus, we are working on using Wi-Fi, bluetooth and magnetic fields, among other data points, to more precisely locate a users’ locations, such as their floor,” said Nagur.
Grab’s navigation feature is currently rudimentary compared to the 3D indoor maps available in Google Maps and the Changi Airport app, yet the ride-hailing provider claims that early tests last week reduced passenger-driver rendezvous times by up to 30 percent. (bbn)
