3PL
Third-party logistics
Customer-specific aisles and mixed-SKU storage that change daily. The digital twin keeps up with the floor — re-walk the area that moved, not the whole building.
Indoor navigation · Mapping · Digital twin
Map any warehouse with a phone. No beacons. No lidar.
Print paper markers, walk the floor once, and your iPhone becomes a turn-by-turn guide to every shelf, pallet, and item — with a live digital twin and an audit log behind it. No hardware to install, no integrator to call.
- Setup cost
- $0
- Accuracy
- ~30 cm
- Hardware
- iPhone
The problem
Knowing where things are shouldn’t cost $50K.
Bluetooth beacons. UWB anchors. RTLS gateways. Lidar surveys, integrator fees, cabling, batteries to swap, quarterly recalibration. A working indoor-positioning system runs five to six figures — before anyone picks a single item.
So most operations skip it and live with the floor plan taped to the office wall. Pickers learn the aisles by muscle memory, new hires burn weeks getting oriented, and when an auditor asks where item #4471 went, someone goes looking.
TraceCapture makes a different bet: print a sheet of paper markers, walk the floor once, and ship — on the iPhone your crew already carries.
How it works
One phone, one roll of stickers, one walkthrough.
- 01
Print paper markers
ArUco markers print on any office laser printer. Stick them to walls, racking, and beams at known waypoints. No power, no batteries, no network.
- 02
Walk the floor once
Open the app and walk the building with the camera on the markers. The phone solves the geometry as it goes and stitches a map of the space.
- 03
Tag every item
QR, barcode, or NFC — whichever sticker survives your environment. A photo auto-classifies the item with on-device ML; dictate notes in any language.
- 04
Navigate by camera
Any phone in the building routes to any item, shelf, or bay with an arrow on the floor. The camera is the compass. Fully offline; syncs when reconnected.
What's inside
Built for the floor, not the office.
Navigation, mapping, tagging, and order workflows — one app, running on a phone your crew already carries.
AR navigation
An arrow on the floor guides pickers through unfamiliar aisles to any bay, pallet, or item — ~30 cm accuracy, no drift between markers.
Digital twin
Every walkthrough updates a live model of the warehouse — top-down floor plan in the app, exportable as JSON today, glTF on the roadmap.
Item tracking
Location → container → item, all in one recursive tree. An append-only audit log captures every scan, photo, GPS fix, and signature.
Photo + ML capture
Snap a photo and on-device ML suggests the item name and category. No typing, no lookup — edit and save.
Activity heatmap
See where the work is happening on the floor plan — records, orders, and changes over 24h, 7d, or 30d.
Order workflows
Receiving, dispatch, move, inventory, pack-out, claim. Each closes with an on-device signature. Export to PDF and XLSX.
Multi-modal labels
ArUco for navigation, QR for items, NFC for high-touch surfaces, barcode for vendor SKUs. The phone reads whatever survived.
Offline-first, iPhone-only
Capture, navigate, search, and sign with no signal — then sync on reconnect. iOS 16+. No tablets, kiosks, or laptops.
See it in the app
Real screens. No mockups.
Everything below is captured straight from the iPhone app — navigation, mapping, tagging, and the order workflows that close with a signature.
Navigate
Find anything by camera
Map & track
A living model of your floor
Capture & orders
From shelf to signed claim
vs. Traditional RTLS
Everything RTLS promises. None of the bill of materials.
| You need | Beacons / UWB / RTLS | TraceCapture |
|---|---|---|
| Setup cost | $20K–$100K hardware + integrator | $0 — print markers on any printer |
| Hardware on site | Beacons, anchors, gateways, servers | Paper markers + the phones you have |
| Power | Batteries to swap or AC to run | Nothing to power |
| Map updates | Surveyor revisit | Walk the changed area again |
| Item tracking | Separate WMS | Same app, same audit log |
| Calibration | Integrator visit | One person, one hour |
| Offline use | Depends on infra | Fully offline; syncs on reconnect |
| Failure mode | One dead beacon kills a zone | Lost marker? Print a new one |
Use cases
Anywhere people move things through a building.
E-COM
E-commerce fulfillment
An arrow on the floor takes pickers to the shelf without memorizing the layout. New hires are productive on day one, peak temps on day one.
MFG
Manufacturing & WIP
Follow work-in-progress from station to station. Each scan extends the audit chain — no paper traveler to lose, no whiteboard to reconcile.
STG
Self-storage & climate
Audit every unit, prove condition at hand-off with photos, and locate anything in a 100,000 sq ft yard from a phone.
RST
Restoration & pack-outs
Insurance-ready chain of custody for fire and flood crews. Every item captured, moved, photographed, and signed — assemble the claim file as a PDF in minutes.
RTL
Retail back-of-house
Stockroom maps that survive a seasonal reset. Find the one carton you need without pulling down three to read the labels.
FAQ
The questions we keep getting.
- Around 30 cm when a marker is in view within a few meters, under normal warehouse lighting. The closer your markers, the tighter the accuracy — print more and place them denser where it matters.
- Print a replacement and stick it up. The map self-heals the moment the new marker is sighted during a walk — no surveyor, no service call. A lost marker only affects its own spot, never the whole floor.
- Neither. The markers are paper. The app captures, navigates, searches, and signs fully offline — basements, freezers, remote yards — then syncs automatically when the phone reconnects.
- iOS 16 and later. AR navigation runs on A14 (iPhone 12) and newer — no LiDAR required. Older supported devices still handle tagging, scanning, orders, and audit.
- Beacons and UWB need hardware on every wall and a five-figure install. We use ARKit plus printed ArUco markers for an absolute coordinate system — RoomPlan gives a floor plan, the markers give it real-world coordinates. Everything runs on-device.
- Your choice. Offline-only on the device (SwiftData), or synced to a backend you control (FastAPI + PostgreSQL on AWS, or self-hosted). Same data model either way; you can export a ZIP backup before switching.
- Yes. Export the warehouse tree to XLSX, pack-outs and claims to PDF, and the model as JSON of nodes, markers, and item metadata today. glTF mesh and IFC for BIM tooling are on the roadmap. Your data is yours — leave anytime and keep it.
- Every scan, move, photo, GPS fix, and signature is written to an append-only log with the operator’s name and a timestamp — the chain of custody insurers ask for. The app’s UI runs in English, Spanish, and Russian, with voice dictation in the field.
How accurate is the navigation? +
What happens when a marker is dirty, torn, or moved? +
Does it need network or power on the floor? +
Which iPhones are supported? +
How is this different from beacons, UWB, or RoomPlan? +
Where does our data live? +
Can we get the data and the digital twin out? +
What does the audit trail capture, and is it multi-language? +
Get in touch
Pilot one site. Watch it map itself.
Tell us about your operation and we’ll send back a marker sheet, a TestFlight link, and a 30-minute onboarding call. Free pilot — no credit card, no commitment.
- › One franchise / one site, up to 5 phones
- › Full feature access for 30 days
- › We help you calibrate the first walkthrough