Show HN: From Photos to Positions: Prototyping VLM-Based Indoor Maps

Just a fun hack I did while bored over the weekend. My wife was busy shopping, it got me thinking that can VLMs solve the indoor location problem in a mall? Can I just show a VLM a map and an image and have it doa good enough job locating me? I hacked this P.O.C and it seems to work.

Show HN: From Photos to Positions: Prototyping VLM-Based Indoor Maps

https://arjo129.github.io/blog/5-7-2025-From-Photos-To-Positions-Prototyping.html

Discussion

rohanrao123

Pretty cool! It reminded me of this work from NVIDIA Research - https://nvidia-ai-iot.github.io/remembr where they used VLMs and RAG on top of a real robot to navigate the Voyager campus in Santa Clara. You also might like the new OpenAI o3 models and how well they can play GeoGuessr ;)

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43835044, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-geniu...