The Ulsan chat app murders made headlines in 2022. A woman in her 30s in Ulsan, who was using a budget phone, was murdered by a man she met on a chat app. The woman called 112 just before she was killed, and the police immediately started to locate her, but they had difficulty tracking her location because her cell phone was subscribed to a budget phone carrier. During the same time that the police were struggling to track her down, she was eventually murdered by a man. The above incident exposed the loopholes in the location tracking system of emergency rescue organizations such as the police at night, and the need to supplement the system is urgent. S360VR has garnered a lot of attention for developing a solution that can completely improve the systemic problems mentioned above through its precise coordinate value technology.

▲ S360VR / CEO Gyeongil Kweon

An intuitive indoor mapping platform that delivers ground-truth floor plans and highly accurate floor distinctions

Revolutionary coordinate system that pinpoints floors to within 1 square meter error

The indoor map platform developed by S360VR, which was founded in 2017, is a platform that integrates indoor and outdoor maps and provides an intuitively understandable and aesthetically pleasing indoor map using ground-based floor plans. The best feature of the solution, which runs as a web app, is that it uses ground-truth floor plans, which can be distinguished very precisely down to the floor level, with a very small margin of error. The system can be actively utilized for commercial purposes in universities, large hospitals, commercial buildings, hotels, shopping malls, government offices, and model houses for apartment sales, and is being evaluated for its usefulness in evacuating and rescuing people in disasters such as fires. The company’s detection app, “Location Query by Text Message,” developed using this technology, is a very practical solution that can be actively used to save lives, as it allows users to query and quickly confirm someone’s GPS coordinates with a simple text message. First responders, such as police and fire departments, are allowed to locate victims under certain requirements in order to rescue victims who are in imminent danger. However, in the field, there are quite a few cases where the rescuers need to find and urgently rescue the victims, but they cannot even identify the exact location of the victims. In the above murder case, a call was made to 112 during an argument, but the call was disconnected before the address was given, and the location could not be searched as a cheap phone user, resulting in the murder. The coordinate system developed by the company is a revolutionary technology that integrates indoors and outdoors to identify locations on Earth with an error of less than one square meter, and indoors to identify the exact floor where the rescued person is located. Industry experts say it could save many lives if used aggressively by first responders. S360VR CEO Gyeongil Kweon says “We have developed an optimal coordinate system for registering digital content with GPS coordinates in the database. It divides the earth’s surface into equal areas of one square meter and gives them an index in a simple way, mathematically generalizing the concept of floors, so that their location indoors and outdoors can be accurately determined.”

S360VR developed an indoor mapping and location sharing platform that utilizes text message queries as a progressive web app, allowing users to use it without downloading an app. This is a very simple service where the rescuer sends the URL of the detection app as a text message to the rescued person using an add-on to the map app, and when the rescued person clicks on the text message, the GPS coordinates are immediately measured and replied to the rescuer or sender. The technology was unveiled at the ‘2023 Smart Construction Expo’ as the only map platform in the world that integrates outdoor maps and provides accurate floor classification, and received an overwhelming response from industry stakeholders. It was also evaluated as having great effect when used by police and fire departments.