From the beginning, Estimote has wanted to create an operating system for the physical world. And it’s just taken another step toward that goal.

The hardware and software company makes Bluetooth-enabled stickers you can put pretty much anywhere. These stickers use beacon technology to communicate with apps on your phone. The way Estimote imagines it, analog people and objects magically become digital and interactive. Estimote co-founder Steve Cheney puts his company’s mission in the form of a question: “What if, in the physical world, you could have a search box, and find stuff inside it?”

Estimote has built that box: It announced this week that you can now track and search for objects in its platform.

Previously, Estimote’s indoor location capabilities extended to people, via their phones. You could deck out a room or building with beacons, and they would triangulate with your phone to determine your location. On screen, this looked like an honest-to-God Marauder’s Map, with people moving around a space in real time.

Now, Estimote’s platform can do with this any object wearing a sticker. When someone with an Estimote-enabled phone comes within range of that object (in location intelligence lingo, these objects are called nearables), the platform records the item’s location and stores it in the cloud. Over time, there will be a huge and evolving library of physical objects and their relation to us at any given time. Later, say you needed to find a certain book: you can type it in and search for its location on your phone, just like you’d Google a library’s location. This platform, Cheney says, “is using the cloud and people as a large data set to crawl the physical world.”

Cheney is the first to admit that it’s unclear how this will all be put to use. That’s been Estimote’s MO in the past—make the technology available, then see what developers and clients do with it. The company is starting to see the results. Target, for instance, is using Estimote beacons in its stores to experiment with offering context-aware shopping. This means Target can push coupons to customers based on past and real-time shopping habits (if you’re buying a TV, maybe you’d like to know what set-top boxes are on sale), but it also means a shopper could search for a specific item and follow a map to it in the store. This indoor GPS system is as high-fidelity as what we’ve come to expect from Google Maps.

As we noted a year ago, an onslaught of hyper-tailored coupons doesn’t sound like a great experience. Cheney agrees: “People just think [beacons] are just for advertising, and that’s so dumb,” he says. “If that’s all it’s capable of just shut it down and go home. There’s so many more things.”

Take, for instance, hospitals and schools. Hospitals have lots of expensive equipment, and you can imagine creating a live map showing the location of it all. Misplaced machines could be located in seconds. The same goes for schools issuing expensive products like iPads. Fewer lost products means money saved and productivity gained. Sure, these are essentially trumped up cases of lost-and-found, but they’re still valuable.

Perhaps more exciting is Estimote’s potential to bring office spaces to life. One New York creative agency (Cheney won’t get more specific than that) is working with Estimote to make its football field-sized open floor plan office come to life with what Cheney calls Minority Report-like applications. Log onto the agency’s app, and as soon as you enter the office’s location-aware intelligence platform (a fancy way to refer to the network of Estimote beacons) a series of seamless interactions can take place. Not only can the front desk know that it’s you arriving for your meeting, but your phone’s location can record certain parts of the office you visited, or track what presentation materials you viewed. In a meeting, your phone can detect the nearest devices and automatically beam content onto them.

All of this interactivity still hinges on one very important human input: putting the beacon stickers on things. That creates a slight constraint for the designers and developers who will be building on top of this infrastructure, but as batteries and chips continue scaling down in size and cost, that will get even easier. It’s not yet in the works, but Cheney imagines that in the future, tiny beacons could even be printed on goods during manufacturing. The overarching goal is to “make the physical world a new canvas for developers to build on top of,” Cheney says. Estimote’s in the business of priming that canvas.