contagt, a Mannheim, Germany, startup that spun out of the University of Mannheim, now wants to guide cruise guests around a ship, after winning the AI Tools & Smart Solutions category at the AIDA Innovation Hub in Rostock on Sept. 16. And it all started with lost cars.

“contagt started with a very everyday problem,” said Benjamin Martin, who works both in sales and business development at the startup company. “As students, our founders couldn’t find their parked car in the huge car park at Frankfurt Airport!”

That then became an app for finding your car again, and customer requests quickly turned the idea into a full indoor navigation platform for all kinds of buildings, Martin explained.

Accessibility is basically the big driver now, he added, “with smartphones and AI making it possible to guide even blind people through buildings.”

Johannes Britsch, one of the founders of contagt explained that “AI has changed what’s possible in indoor navigation within just a few years. Our job now is to turn all that progress into products that work reliably in everyday life, whether that’s say, in a hospital, or a train station or even onboard a ship.”

He continued that “Our goal is really about finding your way in a building, a station or on a ship to become impossibly easy as it is on the street, for everyone out there, including people with disabilities. Smartphones and we think that AI is finally making that possible.”

AIDA picked the winners from more than 150 ideas, with nine finalists presenting in Rostock, and described the contagt entry as a digital indoor navigation system with multilingual content, accessible routes and location-based guidance, one that could also take some pressure off crew who get asked for directions all day.

Each winner can either develop its idea further with the cruise line in an implementation study or test it as a pilot onboard.

Things have moved very fast since then as a few weeks after the AIDA event the contagt team visited the AIDAnova in Kiel.

“The most valuable part for us was really getting to talk directly with the AIDA team and all the crew on site about our tech,” he said. “We discussed very concretely just how, and under which conditions, our technology could actually be used on board any cruise line.”

The technology itself has also already moved on too.

contagt used to work with Bluetooth beacons, QR codes and NFC tags, and still offers them, but Martin said the main approach today that they are exploring is visual image recognition, (which isn’t fully visible on the company’s website yet) but basically the app can use the phone’s camera to scan the floor.

“You can think of it almost like a fingerprint,” Martin explained. “Our software will be able to recognize the very unique patterns it sees there (the floor), so it’s a bit like reading a QR code, only without having to put any codes up.”

This will matter a lot to ships, he explained as in their view, steel decks and walls often either shield or reflect radio signals and beacon systems struggle with this.

Image recognition doesn’t depend on radio at all, Martin said, and it’s also a lot more precise, with accuracy improving from around two meters with the older technologies to roughly 30 centimeters now.

contagt has proven the system in buildings so far, but not yet on a ship, which Martin was upfront about.

“However a ship is essentially the same challenge with even more tight and repeating corridors,” he said.

For guests, he described it as the information terminals around the ship, “only it’s just in your pocket.”

The app adapts automatically to the language set on a guest’s phone, calculates stair-free routes for people with limited mobility and also offers all content in Easy Read, a simplified language format.

The team talks regularly with associations representing people with disabilities, which Martin called the biggest challenge, simply because cruise guests are such a broad group.

“Designing the product so that everyone can understand right away how to use it has been our main product challenge, and it’s one we’ve pretty much largely solved,” he said.

Martin admittedly says he actually isn’t a tech person by training (he studied sociology).

“I’m pretty directionally challenged myself to be honest,” he said. “I get lost in big buildings all the time, and I’ve always wondered why there’s a Google Map for every street but then there is nothing for the inside of the buildings.”

Britsch concured that “Indoor navigation is offering up numerous exciting possibilities for new passenger services on board a ship we are still even further exploring and it’s a lot to do with image recognition and AI that have changed what’s possible in indoor navigation within just the last few years.”

Winning at AIDA is, of course, a first step into a completely new market for contagt, but they are doing it with a large and experienced partner since their award.

“Our goal is to make the world much more accessible, one map at a time,” Martin Said.