Delivered on December 22, 2025
3rd Location Information Award 2025 Grand Prize: 3D People Flow Big Data Transforming the Future of Cities
Speakers:
Yoshiki Kon, President and CEO, MetCom Inc.
Iku Niimura, CEO, Blogwatcher Inc.
Affiliation and position information is as of the time of distribution
The Location Information Awards, held annually by LBMA Japan, recognizes cases that have made an impact on society through the use of location information data.
This year's Grand Prize, decided by votes among member companies, went to MetCom and Blogwatcher's co-creation project: "Practical application of 'level separation based on height information' technology using 3D people flow big data." The representative directors of both companies spoke about the project and their outlook for the future.
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From traditional 2D data to 3D analysis including the "Z-axis"
Until now, location information utilization has mainly focused on flat, 2D (X-Y) data using latitude and longitude. However, in Japan's urban areas, where high-rise buildings and underground shopping malls are densely packed, accurately determining which floor of a building a user is located posed a major challenge.
MetCom Inc.'s technology combines a proprietary barometric sensor network with a terrestrial positioning system to dramatically improve vertical accuracy, a weakness of GPS. This enables "level separation" with an error of just a few meters. By combining this advanced vertical positioning technology with the massive people flow big data held by Blogwatcher Inc., Japan's first practical application of "3D people flow data" has been realized.
Use cases and market needs across a wide range of industries
3D people flow data is expected to be used in a variety of business scenarios.
・Retail & Commercial Facilities: Visualizing occupancy patterns on each floor of a commercial building contributes to analyzing the customer attraction of each tenant and optimizing rent settings by floor. This is an extremely powerful indicator for verifying the effectiveness of complex store layouts, including floors above ground and underground.
・Disaster Prevention & Safety Management: Conventional evacuation simulations generally assume evacuees are on the first floor. However, using 3D data makes it possible to more accurately determine the time and route required for evacuation from higher floors, enabling the development of precise plans to prevent people from being late in the event of a disaster.
・Tourism & Urban Planning: Separating and analyzing intersecting traffic patterns on pedestrian decks and underground shopping malls improves the mobility of inbound tourists and contributes to creating comfortable cities.
・Telecommunications Infrastructure: When investigating the quality of radio waves, including 5G, there is a growing need to understand the communication status of each floor within a building and use this information to optimize area design.
Toward Building a Safe and Secure Location Information Infrastructure
This project was recognized not only for its technological innovation, but also for its robustness as a social infrastructure. In recent years, the vulnerability of GPS (GNSS) to jamming and spoofing has become increasingly apparent. MetCom's terrestrial positioning technology transmits powerful, encrypted signals from the ground and is highly effective as a backup for GPS. The United States has already recommended ensuring GPS backups for critical infrastructure, and the widespread adoption of this "safe and secure location information" will be key to realizing smart cities in Japan as well.
Summary
This award marks not just a technological breakthrough, but also a historic turning point in our society, as we move from two dimensions to three dimensions. The combination of MetCom's advanced vertical positioning technology and Blogwatcher's massive data analysis capabilities has made the unknown realm of urban "height" visible.
This will enable us to provide solid data-driven answers to questions that previously required little more than speculation, from floor-by-floor marketing in retail to realistic evacuation simulations for high-rise buildings. Furthermore, this technology also serves as a next-generation safety net that complements the vulnerabilities of GPS.
As this 3D positioning technology becomes more widespread as standard smartphone infrastructure, it is expected that a society will be realized in which urban life combines greater convenience and safety. The future of location information is no longer limited to flat surfaces, but rather extends into three-dimensional space.