Indoor mapping in Doha, Qatar for stadiums, museums and venues

Qatar prepared eight stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup and has kept hosting international tournaments since. Alongside them, Doha has major museums such as the National Museum of Qatar and the Museum of Islamic Art, purpose-built exhibition and convention venues, the Hamad International Airport terminal and mixed-use districts such as Lusail. The building phase is largely done; the work now is operating these venues well, event after event, with teams that change from one season to the next.

How floor plans become a 3D map in general is on our indoor mapping page. This page is about the Qatari venues that tend to need one, and the bilingual visitors who use them.

A stadium in legacy use is busy in bursts: a league match, a cup final, a concert, then quiet weeks of maintenance. Every event reshuffles the same building — which gates open, which stands are in use, where VIP suites, media positions and first-aid points sit. With the seating bowl, gates, concourses and back-of-house drawn once, each event becomes a set of table rows and colours rather than a new drawing.

The Crown Park demo draws 30,513 seats as cells on two concourses, with turnstile scans, crowd counters, row allocations and food and beverage sales on the same map. A read-only share link with an expiry gives a security contractor or event organiser exactly the floors and layers they need for that event, and stops working afterwards.

A museum needs two maps in one: the visitor’s map of galleries, facilities and exits, and the operator’s map of climate, cameras, staff posts and objects. In the three-floor Production Museum demo, galleries carry live occupancy and climate readings, objects carry RFID tags, audio guides are tracked by BLE, and safety equipment and staff sit on the same plan.

Visitors see only the public layers on their share link; conservation and security teams see the rest. Gallery and object names are your own text, so the map can follow the museum’s own Arabic and English captions word for word.

Doha’s convention and exhibition venues often run a plenary hall, dozens of breakout rooms and an exhibition floor at the same time. Delegates want the room for the next session; organisers want to know which rooms are already full. In the Lakeside demo, session rooms carry their bookings and live occupancy and the plenary auditorium its seating, so an overfull room shows on the map before the corridor outside it fills up.

A terminal applies the same idea at a larger scale: check-in, security, immigration, piers, gates and lounges are drawn once, and throughput, crowding and departures sit on top, as in the Silverbay demo. Spatial Map maps the building and shows the data you feed it; it does not replace airport operational systems.

Lusail’s towers and boulevards combine retail podiums, offices, residences and hotels over shared car parks and plant rooms. For a facilities team, one 3D map that stacks every level — tenant units coloured by status, meeting rooms by occupancy, plant rooms by their latest readings — is easier to hand from one contractor to the next than a folder of drawings. Each building is a facility; group a district’s buildings into one solution so the estate team sees them side by side.

The Navigate button builds a walking route around walls and through doors with turn-by-turn steps, in the viewer and on read-only share links. The share page follows the visitor’s browser language, so an Arabic phone gets the right-to-left interface and an English phone the English one; room, gate and gallery names can be written in both languages.

Routes stay on one floor. Stairs, lifts and escalators carry wayfinding icons and the visitor changes level with the floor switcher — so a stadium route runs from a gate to a stand entrance on the concourse, not from the car park to the seat. A share link behind a QR code at the gate or museum entrance needs no app and no account.