Indoor mapping and wayfinding for Dubai and Abu Dhabi buildings

The UAE’s signature buildings are hard to read from the inside: malls with several retail levels and car parks, terminals with departures and arrivals on different floors, exhibition centres whose halls change layout from one show to the next. Most of them already sign everything in Arabic and English, and visitors increasingly expect the same of anything on their phone.

Our indoor mapping page covers how floor plans become a 3D map in general. This page is about the buildings that dominate UAE projects and what bilingual visitors need from the map.

A mall map has two audiences. Visitors want shops, restrooms, prayer rooms, exits and the lift to their car park level. Operations want tenant units, fit-out status, service corridors and loading bays. In Spatial Map both live in one facility: each unit is an area named after the tenant, escalators and lifts join the levels, and a simple table — open, in fit-out, vacant — colours units for the leasing or operations team while the visitor share link shows only the public layers.

The Retail Mart demo shows the multi-floor pattern: three levels around an escalator core and lifts, with live layers per floor.

In a terminal, the permanent building — check-in, security, immigration, gates, reclaim — is drawn once, and live layers sit on top: queue throughput, zone crowding, departures per gate. The Silverbay demo has 21 reports built from exactly that.

Exhibition venues change every week. Keep the halls, docks, registration and services as permanent shapes, and update the booth blocks for each event; booths, session rooms and badge scans then bind to the current layout, as in the Lakeside demo. Visitors get a share link for that show, set to expire when it ends.

Navigate builds a walking route around walls and through doors with turn-by-turn steps, in the viewer and on share links. The share page follows the visitor’s browser language: Arabic phones get a right-to-left interface, English phones an English one. Shop, gate and hall names are your own text, so you can write them bilingually — “Gate B · البوابة ب” — and they appear that way on the map.

Routes are calculated on one floor at a time. Lifts, stairs and escalators carry wayfinding icons, and the visitor switches levels with the floor switcher — clear enough for a mall level or a terminal pier, and honest about where the route stops.

Digital Dubai leads the emirate’s digital-government and smart-city agenda, and Abu Dhabi runs its own digital transformation programmes; digital twins of buildings and districts feature in that thinking. Spatial Map is not part of those programmes and makes no claim to be. It is a building-level tool: an owner or operator gets a live indoor twin of their own facility, fed by their RFID, BLE and sensor systems through the table write API or REST polling, with reports exported to PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON for whoever needs them next.