Tag: 3D wayfinding system

Many things in our new administration panel work a little bit differently than they used to. If you need help to figure things out, check 3D Wayfinder user manual.

We have updated all the topics and we add information when new features are added. You can find 3D Wayfinder user manual from our web page under “Docs” from main menu or you can use the direct link https://3dwayfinder.com/documentation/user-manual/

User manual for our previous administration panel is also still available, you can find it here: https://3dwayfinder.com/documentation/user-manual/#5

It has taken some time and lots of effort but we have finally made it. New 3D Wayfinder administration panel is finally online and usable for all clients.

We have made many smaller and bigger improvements to make 3D Wayfinder administration panel  easier to use. Especially for new clients. For example the editor has been changed to make it more logical. All the materials have previews for better overview and managing of 2D maps is more convenient.

It should also be more comfortable for those who prefer to use our app on smartphones or tablets.

There are still some kinks to straighten out so if you notice something that isn’t working the way it is supposed to, let us know.

“Sign in” leads straight to new administration panel but if you prefer to use the old one, go to old.3dwayfinder.com or use the link at the bottom of the sign in page. 

The new 3D Wayfinder Administration Panel is centered more around the floor plan editor. To provide better usability we keep the 3D editor idle when moving away to other pages. So switching between editor and other views is much faster now.

The new Administration Panel has been publicly available for testing since the beginning of this year. At the end of the summer we will only support the new administration panel. Although the current administration environment will be available for some time.

Loading the 3D floor plan editor takes a couple of seconds because we need to load 3D floor-plans models and also additional editor tools. Now when the editor is always in the background. We do not need to load the 3D editor again. This makes the usage more faster and user friendly.

Our new administrator panel is being built on Angularjs. To achieve loading of editor once we have created the service that holds the canvas element. It is also attached our editor API to it. Controller then adds canvas to the editor view and provides connection to API actions.

To see and test new Administration panel and floor plan editor, please log in here. If you don’t have an account with 3D Wayfinder, you can create it here for free.

We have recently experimented with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, to see how it can work as media player for digital signage display or wayfinding information kiosk. As a result we can say, it works well with 2D wayfinding maps and with 3D Wayfinder Advertisement Module.

What is Raspberry Pi?

Raspberry Pi is a small credit card sized linux based open source computer. It is equipped with:
– Broadcom 64-bit quad core CPU clocked @ 1.2 GHz,
– 1GB of RAM,
– built-in WLAN and BLE modules,
– HDMI output.

But everything is soldered to the board hence there is no option to upgrade, except for the microSD card. You can also have a nice box for it, so it doesn’t look like a hackers development board.

Compared to other small form factor computers like Intel NUC or Gigabyte BRIX, it is much cheaper. Raspberry Pi with a nice case and microSD card would cost about 50..70 USD. The NUC or BRIX boxes start at 110..130 USD new, and you still need to equip them with a hard drive (SSD/HDD) and memory module(s) (DDR3/DDR4 SO-DIMM RAM) which would cost you about an extra 30 USD for a 32GB SSD and ~25 USD for DDR3 or ~30 USD for DDR4. Totalling up to about 165..190 USD.

Raspberry PI plays in Full HD, so it is not a problem to use large resolution screens.

Enable WebGL

For 3D the Raspberry is still a bit weak and by default it doesn’t have WebGL enabled. To enable WebGL you have to:
1. Open up the terminal application (or command prompt if you prefer to call it that)
2. run command sudo raspi-config
3. navigate to Advanced Options
4. enable GL support.

The GPU on the Raspberry PI 3 Model B doesn’t support floating point textures, so we cannot use transparent textures.

To build wayfinding or digital signage project based on Raspberry Pi you need to use a special linux distribution that opens a browser in full-screen mode instead of the regular desktop interface.

At the same time the kiosk based on Raspberry Pi is quite bullet-proof. There’s no need to worry about excessive power consumption as it actually only consumes about 3.7W under full load and only about 1.4W when playing a FullHD video, which is roughly 10% of the Intel NUCs ~38W while under full system load and ~18W while watching a FullHD video.

It boots up fast from a microSD card which can be easily replaced when it wears out or breaks.

Although remote managing a kiosk that uses a Raspberry Pi can prove to be quite a cumbersome task as you cannot use regular GUI remote management tools like Teamviewer or LogMeIn. The fastest way to remote manage the Raspberry Pi is to use SSH, which is a CLI (Command Line Interface) and this might scare-off most of the users that are not used to poking around via a CLI.

We have developed an interactive kiosk for 3D applications. The kiosk is equipped with a landscape LCD screen, a touch panel and a dedicated graphics card which makes it suitable for applications that require greater graphical computing capabilities.

Most of the modern kiosk hardware is made as thin as possible and in most cases kiosk hardware use small PC-s like Intel NUC’s or even USB stick like Intel Compute Sticks. This is enough for showing advertisements or 2D wayfinding plans, but for larger 3D applications these PCs tend to be too weak. For one of our latest projects we had a challenge to create a special kiosk, where we could put a regular size motherboard and graphics card. The outcome is quite impressive and we are definitely taking this 3D kiosk further so we can provide it to other customers also. It can be counted as first Gamers’ kiosk PC in the world.

The kiosk is built on a metal frame, that supports the 8 mm tempered glass and holds the touch screen and computer hardware. The metal frame has enough weight and the screen is leaning back in a light angle. So it stays firmly on the ground and so there is no need to mount it to the floor.

For the computer we used regular PC components. The idea was to make the inside visible through the glass, so we put the emphasis on the looks of the components. We used components that had LED-lights so it would make a impressive light show. To place graphics cards separately, PCI Express riser cable was used. Common riser cables are white/grey color, but we needed the black one, so it would also look nice.

In current kiosk we used ASUS B150 Pro Gaming motherboard with Intel Core i5-7400 CPU cooling with Antec Kühler H2O H1200 watercooling. Power supply is 700W Zalman 700TX. Graphics card is ASUS GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, but it was planned to upgrade GPU when needed.
After aligning all the components and making the cabling in proper way, we painted the plate black. It is important to fix and align all the cables, otherwise it wouldn’t look nice. Especially as the PC plate will be partly visible through the covering glass of the kiosk.

Kiosk has 3 vents for blowing the air out from the bottom of the frame. On top of the kiosk we have also 3 vent openings, that are being used for air intake. It is possible to use there alsovents, but in current installation we just put there dust filter.

Glass has been mounted to metal frame by special glass mountings. It is possible to paint the glass from both sides to make kind of 3D effect. In current case we used customer’s corporate design elements, which were lines. The background is dark gray, but not in full color, so it is possible to see through it. Also it has a special “window” for looking at kiosk heart – the PC built on wooden plate.

On the inner side of the glass we have installed LED bar, so the edge of the glass is shining. The light also reflects the printed pattern on the back. In our case we used gray, so the effects are not that visible.

The kiosk was created for special building information (BIM) application in Estonian National Museum. There are over 10 thousand elements in this 3D model. This has been so far the largest 3D model used in 3D Wayfinder. When on high end laptop the application is running on around 5 FPS, then in this kiosk it is more than 15 FPS. More detailed overview of the BIM application is coming soon.

Glass was created by Glasstech and kiosk frame was designed and manufactured by Hecada.

We have changed the logic of initializing POI data in 3D Wayfinder. This gives up to 80% faster project initialization for medium and large projects. In very large projects, the increase is even larger – more than 90%.

After data is loaded from the API 3D Wayfinder system had to setup the 3D scene. That also included generating polygons and textures for each POI. These included a POI icon or the name of the POI on a billboard (facing the user all the time). POIs without icons needed to have the name displayed but the only way to display a text in 3D space is to generate or load a image. So we used a canvas element to draw these names. But this is a costly procedure. 

Now we create only these images that are flagged as “Always visible” at the start. So the startup time is a lot faster. Check the following comparison table. That gives faster loading of 3D projects. 

* Project doesn’t have any “Always visible” POIs

Initialization time before and after change compared with medium and Large projects:

Initializing is only a part of the whole loading. Loading the data and 3D models from server is another component of the whole loading process, so the afterall loading process is better about 5-55% (with connection 20Mb/s).

New feature we have added for wayfinding applications is accordion style floors when using path animation. This means, that all floors will be visible on the screens when showing the path through multiple floors.

In 3D Wayfinder you will see all floors as they exist in real building, so they are just simplified 3D models of the real floor-plans. When switching between floors, new floors will drop into scene on top of the previous floors or fly away, if going downward with the path. All floors are exactly covering previous ones, so basically whole 3D building models are sliced by floors.

Now it is possible to keep the floor plans apart from each other, so you can see all floors at the same time. This is useful mainly for wayfinding, so it is easy to remember the whole route. But we will definitely develop this “accordion” mode further, so it can be used also in other applications. For example in BIM applications, it is possible to highlight objects in all floors at the same time. Or visualize the whole factory with multiple floors or create multi-layer metro station animations.

Currently the distance between floors is configured under settings. In future we will add features for separating the floors by dragging the floor-buttons apart. This makes the browsing of 3D buildings much more flexible.

To use this accordion style path animation, go to Settings in Administration panel. Then find Path->3D->Leave a offset between floors. For example use 50 as an offset, and then see how it looks.

We have improved our 3D rendering engine. Thanks to better memory management we got 10..20% performance increase in FPS with larger 3D models.

We updated our WebGL javascript engine – FRAK – in 3D Wayfinder. Many memory management functions have been improved in the new version. With the new FRAK engine 3D Wayfinder provides better loading speed performance for larger 3D models, that use more memory. With smaller 3D models, the increase in speed is not noticeable.

Testing with one really large shopping mall floor plan we got increase in performance in average 15%. In idle mode we recorded 16 frames per second (FPS) increase, jumping from 44 FPS to 50 FPS. While actively showing path we recorded a 7 FPS increase, jumping from 38 FPS to 45 FPS. In normal use, 3D Wayfinder is limited to 30 frames per second.

A new template for development purposes has been published with simplified javascript API. Now it is even easier to get started with 3D Wayfinder and the integration of 3D maps into web applications.

We have published a special template for development purposes. It includes a 3D map with resize function, floor buttons, list of locations and groups etc. Also each part in template has a tooltip, where it is possible to see the javascript function which has been used for that specific section.

In Addition with the template we are releasing a new SimpleWayfinderApi class that extends the existing Wayfinder class. You can find the SimpleWayfinderApi documentation here. To use the SimpleWayfinderApi in Your application embed with <script src=”//static.3dwayfinder.com/projects/shared/js/simpleWayfinderApi.js”></script >

It includes basic functions for getting floor, group and location data. Functions for getting specific objects (floor, group, location) to accept the object’s ID as a selector instead of using the object itself as a parameter.

The development template is a good way to start building your web-based 3D applications.
You can use this template by getting the embedded code from the template page. The template itself can be accessed via the administration panel at admin.3dwayfinder.com when selecting the view with template “DevTemplate”.

In addition to the new development template it is possible to test the new SimpleWayfinderAPI in a sandbox at CodePen.

Both the development template and simple wayfinder API will be updated with new features and functions regularly.

Our sales team can help You to find the best wayfinding solution for You or Your customer. We can help You with creating 3D floorplans, designing a custom template and integrating wayfinding with other software. Now you can request for a 3D Wayfinder demo. 

We have made getting to know our software and our projects even easier for you than before. You can now find the request for a 3D Wayfinder demo button on our homepage.

Exploring 3D Wayfinder with your own resources is the most common way of getting to know our software. But it is even simpler if you ask for a demo and can have an interactive conversation with our people to clear out all the details of your floor plans creation needs and wayfinder requirements.

We will show you the basics you need to get started and will answer all of your questions about the software. During the demo we can also discuss any custom solutions and requests you might have.