Month: May 2023

We are presenting the Hospital Wayfinder solution at SantExpo 2023. SantExpo is the largest healthcare IT exhibition in France and one of the largest healthcare exhibitions in Europe. Lots of interest about wayfinding software and how to make visitor’s experience better in hospitals.

Hospital Wayfinder is our wayfinding solution for healthcare and hospitals. Hospital Wayfinder has been specially designed and developed for hospitals, clinics, retirement homes etc. There are lot of interest and really good feedback about our wayfinding software. Allmost every visitor has personally got lost in hospital buildings before and sees the potential in our wayfinding solution for hospitals.

SantExpo is the leading French event of the French Hospital Federation. It brings together all decision-makers and healthcare professionals involved in the management, digital, care pathway, patient experience, equipment, materials, construction and transformation of healthcare institutions.

Besides IT solutions, there are different innovative and less innovative companies presenting healthcare related services and products. Getting contacts and earning money is definately the main focus, but behind that is the idea of solving hospital and healthcare problems. As we know, the healthcare sector is getting larger and larger with every year and there are more patients and more hospitals around the world.

In SantExpo, big players like Microsoft, Amazon, Philips, Siemens etc. are also present. As healthcare is a large market in France, every major company has a special solution also for healthcare.

As with many other exhibitions we have been visiting, SantExpo maps were also not digital. Almost hard to find a specific company and even harder to find companies by keywords and categories. Although the maps were printed on the floors, you still have to walk around looking for company signs.

Today is the last day at SantExpo, meet us near the main caffeteria next to Start-Up village section. Or just contact our sales to ask about our wayfinding solution for healthcare and hospitals.

We have fixed one bug in 3D Wayfinder that caused transparent meshes to be not visible at all. This
hasn’t accured before. But now it is fix and loading materials for 3D models is also faster now.

In the vast realm of 3D graphics, transparent meshes are a powerful tool that adds depth, complexity and realism to virtual environments. By allowing light to pass through certain areas of a 3D model, transparent meshes offer a myriad of creative possibilities for designers, game developers, and artists and also for 3D Wayfinder users.

Transparent meshes are mostly use for creating windows (glass) in 3D Wayfinder. At the same time transparent meshes are good to mark room ceilings. So ceilings can be click without showing the actual mesh on top of the room.

A transparent mesh, in simple terms, is a three-dimensional object that has some parts or surfaces that are see-through. This see-through effect is achieve by assigning a certain level of transparency to specific polygons or vertices within the mesh. Transparency is commonly represent by an alpha value, where 0 represents complete transparency (invisible) and 1 represents full opacity (completely visible).

Most 3D software packages provide material or shader settings that allow artists to control the transparency of meshes. These settings typically involve adjusting the alpha value or using texture maps to define the transparency level. In 3D Wayfinder we use also shaders for creating mesh-transparency. To use transparency for material, just change the “Shader type” to “Transparent”. The transparency is determine also by the 2 letters in the color (FF is not transparent and 00 is fully transparent).

According to one of our last projects. We found out that not all transparent meshes are shown.

This bug was fixed by overwriting the code for loading materials. So the bug has been fix and loading
process for materials should be also faster.

Please read 3D Wayfinder tutorial about managing materials and transparency settings. We also have some guidelines for creating 3D maps (https://3dwayfinder.com/documentation/docs-floor-plan/modelling-guidelines/) for 3D Wayfinder, please look them also before starting to create your own 3D wayfinding maps.

We are currently developing voice recognition feature for 3D Wayfinder. It will allow visitors to use wayfinding software without using touch-screens. Just say where you would like to go and wayfinder software will show you the way.

Voice recognition is becoming more popular and as the quality recognizing words is becoming better and mobile screens becoming smaller. It would be convenient to use voice orders instead of using touch-screens. Of course, there are privacy issues, as most of the voice recognition is done in servers. But for wayfinding software this is not an issue, as the wayfinding screens are public and nobody will make their private conversations near wayfinding screens.

How voice recognition for wayfinding works?

Let’s say you are looking for closest exit, toilet or just want to get a beer. So you just say “Exit”, “Closest toilet” or “Wayfinder, where can I get beer” and 3D Wayfinder can show you the route.

3D Wayfinder will use keywords and location names for voice recognition, the same way search functionality works. More keywords defined in wayfinder make the vocabulary larger. But definitely there will be AI implement in future. This will give much more possibilities. For example visitors canaska pint of Budweiser without “Budweiser” being entered as a keyword and still get to place where they can buy beer. Might be that the beer is not sold by pint. But at least they can get beer.

We can use languages for voice recognition, that are select in Wayfinder software. Languages can be add under settings in 3D Wayfinder administration panel. If possible, voice recognition can be active for all languages simultaniously. If not, we can use default language for voice recognition without selecting anything. After selecting prefered language wayfinder can switch also language for voice recognition. This depends capabilities of kiosk or touch-screen PC. Also, the challenge is to filter out background noise as wayfinder screens are usually in main entries and places where are more people around.

In future, voice recognition in wayfinding software will be available for all customers. It has to be turn on under settings and it would also require template that allows voice search. We will add this feature to our basic templates. So far, we can implement it in custom templates. So if you order custom template from us, we can also make search by voice available.