When it comes to GPS we've seen a number of Nokia developments of late. tomorrow sees the launch of Good Things for Ovi Maps, while earlier in the year we saw Here&Now launch from Beta Labs . However, Nokia has been outlining its two-year plan for Indoor Location Based service, check out what going down indoors after the jump...

Nokia’s VP of social location services, Michael Halbherr, has confirmed that Nokia is undertaking a two-year development programme for Indoor Location Based services for mobile devices, which will enable users to locate places, people and things via GPS without the current need for the sky - or satellites - above their heads. Sound like science fiction?

In an interview with PC World, Halbherr outlined the difficulties designing GPS for indoors. Currently, GPS requires that you have a clear view of the sky for it to work, which means its not that useful when you’re underground, in a building, or trapped somewhere. Fortunately, Nokia’s new indoor location service sets to eradicate this problem by developing a completely new paradigm for how GPS works.

In short, Nokia’s new indoor location service will rely on GPS inside cellular base stations and Wi-Fi hotspots in order to map and model the inside of buildings instead of satellites. In theory, this means that it’ll still use GPS satellite function when outside, but once you approach a building it will switch to communicating with the cellular and Wi-Fi base stations inside, allowing it to function in places which were previously black spots or dead-zones.

The new software will rely on the acquisition of data, which Halbherr says can be collected by people simply walking around inside buildings establishing a location, similar to the way cars fitted with cameras mapped out images of our streets for Google Street View. Apparently, Nokia devices are currently collecting this data from all around the world -  don’t worry though, at this stage it’s merely raw location data, nothing too personal.

While Google are also rumoured to be developing similar software, it seems that Nokia may have the upper hand this time round thanks to their lion’s share of the mobile device market and their recent acquisition of Navteq - but with a 2 year wait on the technology, it’s anyone’s guess who’ll get there first.

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