Mall operations on one live 3D map: floors, units, devices and tenants

A mid-size shopping mall is a small city. Security runs patrols and watches the cameras. Housekeeping moves carts between floors. The loading dock juggles delivery slots for dozens of tenants. Facilities watches HVAC, lighting and escalators in the building management system. Leasing debates footfall with the anchor tenants. Each team has its own software, and each answers its own question — but almost none of them can say where.

Lease, maintenance and accounting tools are good at records and poor at space. A mall operations dashboard built on a live 3D map flips the order: the building comes first, and every feed is pinned to the floor, unit, corridor or bay it describes. That is what a mall digital twin should mean in practice — not a pretty render, but the floor plan as the shared index for every system.

Everything starts with the building. In the Spatial Map editor you place each level’s plan — a PDF is scaled from its sheet size, a DWG or DXF drawing is rendered as a floor-plan image, or use a PNG or JPG — and trace units, corridors, the food court, washrooms, service corridors and loading bays as areas on top. The model sits on a real basemap, so car parks and street entrances line up with the building outline.

• Floors — one floor plan per level, with a floor switcher in the viewer.
• Areas — retail units, anchor tenants, the food court and back-of-house as polygons, each with an optional role from a list you edit in the facility settings (for example Retail unit, Food & beverage, Service corridor).
• Stairs, lifts and escalators — drawn in 3D and linked from one floor to the next.
• Markers and text labels — fixed equipment such as fire points, kiosks or reader locations, and unit numbers on the floor.

Retail Mart Store in the editor

Escalators and lifts are their own tool. Select one and the side panel sets its kind (escalator or elevator), direction, a single unit or an up + down pair, and the floors it connects — so every level reads as part of one building rather than a stack of unrelated drawings. See lifts and escalators.

An escalator selected in Retail Mart Store

Retail Mart Store carries four live data links across its Ground floor, Level 1 and Level 2. Each one is a layer viewers switch on and off, and each maps neatly onto a mall job:

• Department stock status — a Color a shape link tints 40 departments from a status field, with three style rules: Critical red, Low amber, Healthy green. In a mall the same pattern colours units by lease status, open/closed, cleaning done, or a fault reported.
• RFID reader activity — 85 readers shown with Pulsing zone activity, coloured by style rules: Active violet, Idle grey, Offline red. Swap readers for door controllers, people counters or escalator status and you have a device-health layer.
• Cold-chain temperature — seven fridge and freezer probes as Live location markers labelled with their reading. A mall uses the same mode for any positioned sensor or tracked asset: security patrols, cleaning carts, maintenance kit.
• Shelf stock by rack — markers labelled with each rack’s fill percentage. For a centre: occupancy or footfall per unit as a number you can read at a glance.

Retail Mart Store in the viewer, all layers on

Other display modes earn their place in a mall too. Camera field of view draws each camera’s cone from its yaw, field-of-view angle and view distance, so coverage and blind spots are visible in 3D. Heatmap of activity turns positioned events — anonymous detections, patrol check-ins — into a density map. Historical movement replays a table’s change log with a player at the bottom of the map. The display modes guide lists all of them.

The fastest way to design a mall operations map is to start from the questions the control room asks, then pick the data and display mode that answers each one:

There are no proprietary connectors to wait for. Any system that can send or serve JSON, or export a file, can feed the map:

• Tables with a write API — create a table, issue an API key per system, and let each system write rows. Changes show up on open maps without a refresh. Best for device status and positions.
• REST pull — Spatial Map fetches an endpoint on a schedule, with no auth, an API key, a bearer token or custom headers. A table can do this from our servers; an Integrations REST source is pulled by the browser while a map is open.
• File upload — CSV, XLSX, JSON or GeoJSON for data that changes slowly, such as a tenant list exported from the lease system.

1. 1
   Create the source

   Tables → Create new table (pick the kind: Polygon / area for units, Sensor, Camera, Asset (mobile) or RFID tag for devices), or Integrations → Add integration for a REST API or file.

2. 2
   Create one data link per layer

   In the editor, Data → Manage data links → New link: pick the source, the display mode, the shapes it attaches to and which floors it shows on.

3. 3
   Style by value

   Add style rules in the editor’s side panel — colour by status, team or threshold — and tick them on the link. Choose the fields for the tooltip and the content viewer.

4. 4
   Group it as a solution

   Collect the mall, its reports and its data sources into one solution so the operations team sees them, and integration health, on one page.

The model that powers the control room also answers the oldest mall question: how do I get to that shop? Pick a start and a destination and Spatial Map draws a walking route around walls and through doors, with turn-by-turn directions. Routes stay on one floor; stairs, lifts and escalators are shown on the map so a visitor can see where to change level. See wayfinding.

Behind the map, each stream deserves a report. The Retail Mart demo has RFID Live Map, a full-map report: the reader list on the left, the live store in the middle, KPIs on top and an Insights panel with status and per-floor charts. Reports can be filtered, starred and exported to PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON.

RFID Live Map report for Retail Mart Store

A mall is full of people who need a view of the building but should never edit it: anchor tenants, the cleaning contractor, the security provider, the fire consultant. Share links are built for that. Each facility can have many read-only links, each with its own settings:

• Lock the link to one floor, or let the viewer switch floors.
• Choose which data links it shows — the cleaning contractor sees cleaning assets, not device health.
• Hide whole shape kinds, or turn live data off entirely.
• Set an expiry (one hour to one year, a custom date, or never) and a maximum number of views; revoke it any time from Manage links.

Share facility dialog

Inside your organisation, members and roles control access. Invite colleagues by email — they need a Spatial Map account first — and give each one of four roles: Owner and Admin manage the workspace and its members, Editor changes the map, data links and reports, and Viewer looks without touching. See members and roles.

A first version fits in an afternoon: place one floor’s plan, draw the anchor tenants and the main mall, and connect one live feed — usually device status or the delivery schedule. Add layers and floors as each system owner comes on board.

Start a 7-day free trial with no credit card; the trial holds up to 5 facilities. After that, Pro is $60/month or $600/year for up to 4 facilities — see pricing. For the bigger picture, visit the shopping mall solution page.