Tag: widgets in wayfinding applications

Wayfinding applications are not just maps with “You Are Here” dot anymore. There are many possible functionalities and widgets that our customers prefer to see on their wayfinding applications. 3D Wayfinders HTML-based user interface makes it really easy to add and use such widgets in wayfinding application.

As wayfinding kiosks are usually in visible places. Visitors would also like to find other kind of information than the building map and directory listing. Large shopping malls are usually accessible via intercity bus or metro stations. It is important to find the commuting schedules. Also in larger modern shopping malls. There are integrated cinemas, which would also like to show their programme.

Nowadays people have smartphones, that can show weather forecast and date beside the clock. But still one of the things our customers are asking for quite often. This is a clock integrated to the wayfinding application.

We have created a NPM package ‘ng.clock’ for the widget. It can be found at https://www.npmjs.com/package/ng.clock. Demo of the clocks can be found here https://codepen.io/tonister/pen/qpyBgQ. This clock widget is made as an AngularJS 1.x Directive. The choice to use AngularJS is due to the fact that almost all our latest templates have been created using AngularJS.

3D Wayfinder user interface is created with HTML. It is easy to implement any widget or integrate bus or cinema schedules inside wayfinding application user interface. Although it might be good to mention that for some of these features the API licenses are not free. If they are free then they are very limited.

Thanks to HTML5 based layouts it is easy to integrate different kind of widgets in wayfinding application. For example exchange rates, events, news, weather forecasts, social media feeds, CAP alerts, time remaining till closing.

3D Wayfinder is now being used for Building Information Model (BIM) applications. By creating BIM kiosk software for Estonian National Museum we have added many new and useful features to our software and improved the performance for larger models.

Estonian State Real Estate Ltd ordered Building Information Model solution from us for recently opened Estonian National Museum. Now the visitors can easily explore the 3D model of the whole construction. Also they get the overview of the building by all the details.

What is BIM applications?

BIM model is a digital equivalent of the building. It can contain everything from doors to electric fixtures. Although BIM applications technology and methodology is more common in the design of the building. It has large potential benefits for buildings management and maintenance phase.

Estonian National Museum’s new building is meant both for exhibitions and scientific work with net area of 33 879 square meters. We received a model of a building made with Revit, Autodesk software for BIM. It contained highly detailed information – e.g. all the pipes – so it needed a lots of simplifying.

After the adaptations we still had a huge file with close to 12 000 separate elements. It is the largest model we have had in 3D Wayfinder. It was also the reason why we changed the logic of initializing POI data to make the loading of large objects faster.

Table view for all objects in BIM model was done by using Spreadcell. Spreadcell has easy upload from MS Excel files and it provides table-view, sorting etc by webservices (in JSON format). All the objects are divided into separate groups so the final user can choose what do they want to see, hide or find.

Kiosk design

We also built and designed the kiosk from scratch. Since most of the modern kiosk hardware is only enough for showing advertisements or 2D wayfinding plans. The kiosk is equipped with a landscape LCD screen, a touch panel and a dedicated graphics card. It makes kiosk suitable for applications that require greater graphical computing capabilities.

3D Wayfinder application helps to make BIM useful for those who have no access to specific softwares themselves. For example we can integrate BIM with different management softwares. Also add the ability to write comments. In this way we make it easier for different parties to collaborate on centrally shared model.

We have added compass widget for Developers Template. Compass arrow can be shown on top of the map canvas to point to the north (or any other direction) of the 3D floor plan.

Compass is one of the tools and widgets that is needed for one of our larger building information (BIM) project. There are also other tools under development that provide building information and help work with different data related with building 3D model.

Compass widget is using 0-point of the Y-axis. It is called with Camera view-port service orbitController.  It has property currentRotation, which holds the model’s rotation data.  Needle of compass is animated using that data.
Compass example is integrated into Development template. Template can be accessed via the administration panel at admin.3dwayfinder.com when selecting the view with template “DevTemplate”.

When using compass, it is important to notice, that the 3D floorplan has to be modelled north pointing to Z axis. Otherwise you need to make adjustments in widget’s javascript code, which calculates the compass’ position.