Indoor wayfinding software: turn-by-turn directions on your floor plan

GPS stops at the front door. Inside an airport terminal, a convention center, a university campus, a shopping mall or a large store, people find their way by signs, by asking someone, or by guessing, and every wrong turn has a cost. In a terminal it is a passenger who heads for the wrong end of the concourse; at a convention it is a visitor who misses the start of a session. In a store it is a shopper who gives up on the department they came for, or a new team member who can’t find the stockroom.

Indoor wayfinding software needs three things: an accurate indoor map, a routing engine that understands walls and doors, and directions people can follow. The expensive one is usually the first: keeping a separate wayfinding dataset in sync with a building that changes every quarter. Spatial Map does not keep a separate dataset. Routes come from the same floor plan you maintain for operations, so when a wall moves in the editor, the directions move with it. If you are planning an airport, venue or mall map, a retail store map or a campus or office map, wayfinding comes with the drawing. The demo workspace has several buildings to explore: Silverbay International Airport Terminal 2, Lakeside Convention Center, Westbrook University, Harborview Corporate Campus and the three-floor Retail Mart Store.

Navigate sits in every viewer

There is no wayfinding layer to author. When someone asks for a route, Spatial Map reads the shapes on the current floor and turns them into a walkability grid of 25 cm squares, fine enough to thread a standard door with room to spare. Each shape kind plays one role:

Then A* does the search. It moves in four directions on the grid with a small cost for every change of direction and a slight preference for cells away from walls. The raw result is cleaned up in a few passes: straight runs are merged, corners are pulled tight and each segment is centred in its corridor. What you see is a few long, clean legs that turn at junctions, not a staircase of grid steps.

• Clearance. Walls and racks are padded by about 0.3 m, roughly half a person’s width, so a gap narrower than about 0.6 m counts as closed.
• Hidden shapes don’t count. Hide a door in the editor and the router treats it as shut.
• Clicks inside an obstacle snap. Click inside a rack or a wall and the point moves to the nearest open spot within 3 m.

Racks are obstacles, aisles are corridors

In the read-only viewer, a Navigate button sits at the bottom left of the map, above Auto-rotate. Press it and it turns green and reads Stop navigating; while it is on, clicks on the map place route points instead of opening shape details. Click your start point, then your destination, and the route is drawn with a Directions panel beside it. A third click starts a new route. In pitched 3D views the line is lifted over raised areas so it stays visible.

The Directions panel works the way a pedestrian navigation app does:

• A summary: total distance, an estimated walking time based on an average adult pace of 1.35 m/s (“4 min walk”), and the number of turns.
• A first step with a compass heading (“Head NE”), because indoors there is no street name to start from.
• Distance-based steps such as “In 24 m, turn right” or “In 8 m, bear left”. Changes of direction under 15° are folded into “continue straight”; sharp turns and U-turns are called out.
• “Arrive at destination” as the last step.
• Clear failure states instead of a misleading line: No path found, Start point is blocked or Destination is blocked.

Nothing is saved: closing the route or reloading the page clears it. The wayfinding docs list every state and what triggers it.

Terminals, venues and malls are rarely single-storey, so here is exactly how floors work today. In the viewer, the route is computed on the floor you pick in the floor switcher, from that floor’s walls, doors and racks. Stairs, lifts and escalators are not part of the search, so a trip from a ground-floor entrance to a second-floor department is two legs with a handover at the lift.

1. 1
   Leg 1

   On the starting floor, route from where you are to the stairs, lift or escalator you want to use.

2. 2
   Switch floors

   Pick the destination level in the floor switcher.

3. 3
   Leg 2

   Route from where the lift or stairs arrive to the destination.

What makes the handover readable is how vertical transport is drawn. Lifts and escalators come from the Stairs & lifts tool. An escalator has a direction (Up or Down), a layout (Single or Up + down pair) and a From floor and To floor; an elevator lists its Floors served and its stops. Each carries a wayfinding icon on the map, and a lift marked Out of service is drawn greyed out with a strike-through, so nobody is sent to a lift that is switched off. The lifts and escalators guide covers every setting.

An escalator in the Retail Mart Store demo

1. 1
   Open the facility and show one floor

   Route preview uses the shapes on the floor plans that are visible in the editor, plus shapes with no floor. Hide the other floors first.

2. 2
   Press N

   Or click the arrow labelled “Route from A to B (indoor wayfinding)” on the toolbar. The cursor becomes a crosshair.

3. 3
   Click A, then B

   The path is computed at once and the Directions panel shows the same steps your visitors will see.

4. 4
   Fix what the route reveals

   A route that slips through a wall means a missing wall segment; “No path found” usually means a missing door. Fix the shape and click again: there is no rebuild step.

Wayfinding is an accessibility feature first, so it is worth being precise. The router finds the shortest sensible walk on a floor while keeping about 0.3 m clear of walls and racks. It does not choose a lift over stairs for you, and it doesn’t check door widths against wheelchair requirements. The step-free choice is made at the handover, and you can make it easy:

• Route leg 1 to the lift, not the stairs, whenever you prepare step-free directions for a visitor guide, an event confirmation or a kiosk script.
• Keep lift status current. A lift set to Out of service shows a greyed, struck-through icon.
• Draw doors at their real width and only where people can actually pass: a staff-only door on the map is a door the router will use.
• Treat the walking time as a typical adult pace. Wheelchair users, travellers with luggage and anyone pushing a trolley will take longer.
• Hide a door in the editor to model a closure (building works, cleaning, a fire door held shut) and re-test with N.

Directions only help if the people who need them can open the map. Every facility can have several read-only share links, each with an optional expiry date and view limit, its own appearance and layout, and the right to be revoked at any time. The Navigate button is part of the viewer itself, so it is on share links too: a visitor, contractor or new starter opens the link in a modern browser and gets directions without an account.

Typical setups: an airport or venue link on the main-entrance screen or in event emails; a campus link for new students and visitors; a store link on the team’s tablets; a mall link for tenant staff and contractors. Auto-rotate sits next to Navigate for screens that should idle with a slow orbit of the building.