Tag: wayfinder advertising

User experience

Important improvements of advertising with wayfinding

Some of the important improvements include:

⦁Drag-and-drop feature for changing advertisement frames

⦁Default duration setting for video adds

⦁Improved splitting of advertisement areas

⦁Easy separation of Portrait and Landscape screens

Having a wayfinding solution, for any type of establishment, is a sure way to take the visitors’ experience to a new level. Wayfinding allows people to save time and reduce stress by making navigating easy. You can get acquainted with the building and find the fastest routes. At a time of a pandemic, wayfinding also makes things safer. However there is so much more that 3D Wayfinder has to offer withour integrated solutions! For instance, let’s talk about wayfinding advertisement.

Making Full Use of Your Platform

When choosing 3D Wayfinder, you have a choice between an on-site kiosk solution, mobile application or a website integration. Or all of them! It is our view, that once you’ve chosen to have a wayfinding solution for your venue, it is silly not to apply it to it’s full potential. The two main benefits of wayfinding advertising are making the visitors’ experience more pleasant and getting a return on your investment.

Making Shopping Easier

The most obvious way to use wayfinding advertising is through banner ads displaying videos, images or animations. But we can create even more useful solutions.

For example, imagine just going shopping without a specific item to buy in your mind. You check the nearby kiosk to see what stores there are in the center. The intuitive 3D model and building directory will give you an understanding of the building, but in addition to that, the shops with an ongoing sale are highlighted. It is also possible to develop an option to search for specific items in the mall or to browse all the items on sale. You can also give high priority stores a leg up by displaying their items first.

Another clever way to notify customers is through indoor positioning and mobile apps. As the customer is moving through the venue the mobile app can send them notifications about sales in stores that they’re passing. If the app has more detailed information about the user, like age, gender or interests, it can send out even better targeted notifications.

In conclusion, there are nearly endless ways to further integrate our wayfinding and venue management solutions into your enterprise. These innovations allow you to save money and streamline your operations. In addition the upgraded customer experience will surely keep people coming back!

To find out more you can contact us here or apply for a quote here!

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.

With 3D Wayfinder you can brand your wayfinding application just like it has been developed by yourself. It is possible to use custom loading bar and even get your own layout for administration panel.

We are using small watermark with 3D Wayfinder logo on 3D floor plans. But this only appears, when you are using free plan. As soon as you choose another plan, the watermark disappears.

When using the Business plan it is possible to customize the loading bar of your wayfinder application.

With the Enterprise license it is even possible to change the branding of the Administration Panel. This way you can offer the 3D Wayfinder under your branding or integrate 3D Wayfinder inside your digital signage solution. For Enterprise licensing, please contact us.

Advertisement add-on user manual is now publicly available. Advertisement add-on makes your wayfinding application part of your digital-signage channel. It is possible to use video and banner ads. Also set duration, layout and everything you need for managing advertisements in malls or airports.

User manual covers the most basic part of managing advertisements:

• Choosing advertisement area.
• Creating frames and modifying frame layout.
• Managing frames.
• Setting restrictions e.g. date period, when frame will be shown.
• Uploading images and videos.

Advertisement user manual is part of 3D Wayfinder administration panel manual.

Read how to add and manage different ads in 3D Wayfinder. Ads can be images or videos. It is possible to create different layouts. You can also use a “screen saver” mode. Then you can show only advertisements. This helps to profit from wayfinding, when nobody is currently using the application. It is he good opportunity for shopping center and transportation facility.

Advertisement add-on price is 99 USD per month. See also other 3D Wayfinder add-ons.

Please contact our sales team for more information.

Some of our customers prefer a “Welcome” screen for their wayfinding application. Welcome screens are good way for inviting visitors to use wayfinding, it is also a page where you can show advertisements or welcome text. To minimize the load for kiosks we change the frame-rate of our WebGL rendering engine FRAK. 

Welcome page is configur as an idle-page, when no one is using wayfinding. Usually it is set to 10+ seconds after idle time, when the welcome screen is displayed. On this view, we are hiding wayfinder map component and directory. When visitor starts to use wayfinding, then welcome screen close and floor plans with directory are activate. Certainly, the welcome screen is also helpful for customers to understand what the screen is about. Also a great way to advertise for businesses located in the mall.

To save the kiosk pc and graphics card (GPU) we set the 3D rendering (see FRAK WebGL engine) also idle. This is important for limiting the frame-rate to a minimum. Frame rate change can be invoke with Engine.startIdle(fps) and return to normal operation with Engine.stopIdle(). See 3D Wayfinder API for specific documentation.

We have also fixed a bug in SmoothOrbitController that made animations oscillate on very low frame rates.