Indoor Mapping and Navigation for Events & Conferences - Everything You Need to Know

For as long as corporate events have been ‘a thing’, they’ve needed maps. Unlike buildings such as airports or hospitals, where building layouts tend to be fixed for years or even decades, and guests can as such become accustomed to them across multiple visits, events and conferences tend to last for a matter of days, with hundreds or sometimes thousands of booths or stalls all competing for attention. 

For any event guests with a specific grocery list of exhibitors to visit, no amount of standard signage or instructions will ever be enough to navigate most modern conferences or events - hence the need for maps. However, even with a printed map, the battle for many event attendees still isn’t won, as attempting to glean information about the whereabouts of a specific exhibitor is easier said than done when there are dozens to choose from and often cramped layouts to find them within.

However, help is at hand. Digital indoor mapping and wayfinding systems, once the sole domain of locations such as airports and hospitals which could rely upon relatively static layouts, are now enabling the location-powered event and conference of the future. In this article, we’ll explore some of the key challenges these systems have been forced to overcome, how they work, and some of the most prominent use cases we at Pointr have enabled for some of the world’s biggest events in recent years.

Why do events/ conferences need indoor maps and wayfinding?

Indoor navigation and positioning systems are experiencing a huge surge in popularity across a vast number of sectors, and events and conferences are no exception. In fact, events are currently one of the areas adopting indoor location systems at the fastest clip.

The reasons for this are primarily the size and transience of modern conferences. 

Many conferences are now enormous, covering hundreds or even thousands of exhibitors in vast indoor locations or across multiple buildings, meaning that finding a specific location or booth is often a challenging enterprise. 

To compound this, most conferences, despite their size, last for just a few days. This means that, unlike airports or hospitals for example, there’s little time for attendees to orient and familiarize themselves with their surroundings over repeat visits and 'learn' the layout.

These two factors combined mean that having a robust, scalable, intuitive to use mapping system is integral to enabling visitors to navigate easily and effectively to the parts of the event that will provide them with the best attendee experience possible.

What are some of the event-specific challenges to creating indoor maps and location services? 

• Cost - One consistent consideration for events when it comes to indoor location has been the cost associated with creating such a system. As events have become more frequent and many event companies now host multiple events in the same spaces each year, this consideration has been alleviated somewhat, but the cost is still a factor. However, new innovations such as Pointr’s MapScale® tool for AI-generated maps have helped drive costs down, and mean that the cost of even a single-use installation is less of a worry for event companies

• Different stakeholders - One challenge unique to providing maps and indoor location to events is that sometimes it will be the event venue looking to implement a system so that all future events have access to the technology (sometimes with an additional fee to the venue), and sometimes it will be the event itself wanting the technology. The latter scenario can be particularly complex, as it can involve installing technology such as beacons on infrastructure not owned by the event organizers

• Timeframes - Perhaps the single biggest hurdle to clear when dealing with indoor location and maps for events are the timeframes involved. Often, event floor layouts won’t take shape until a matter of days or even hours before the show itself begins, meaning an extremely tight turnaround is required to map, install, and test whatever level of location technology is being implemented. For companies that rely on achieving indoor location through methods such as fingerprinting or geomagnetic methods, such restricted timeframes often make mapping and providing location services to events or conferences a complete non-starter
• Amount of information needed on map - Events, with hundreds of booths or exhibitors in close proximity to one another, often present an additional challenge over maps of other indoor locations in terms of the sheer amount of information that need to be be displayed in a relatively small area. This means that physical maps, or even digital PDF-style versions, are rarely able to convey all the necessary details of an event’s floorplan. When choosing an indoor mapping supplier, event organizers must be mindful of finding one that has a map system capable of displaying the right granularity of information depending on the user’s behavior and zoom level

What advantages do in-app digital event maps have over physical paper maps?

While indoor mapping systems have experienced a surge in popularity in recent years thanks to the advances and technological breakthroughs made by companies like Pointr, the idea of mapping events has existed for much longer. Many events have leveraged more traditional maps, such as those printed on paper or on large informational boards over the years. So why do digital indoor maps represent such an improvement?

• Interactivity - Particularly for large events with thousands of booths or points of interest, a physical map will never be able to contain all the location information. The interactivity - such as being able to scroll through the map, or zoom in and out - of an indoor mapping system means that whether a user is looking to get an overview of the entire event floor, or they’re looking for a specific booth, their needs are catered for (with the right mapping provider)

• Updatable - Due to their quick turnaround times, even the best-planned events will often need to make last-minute changes to layouts, booth positions, and more. With printed or otherwise physical maps, any late changes are unlikely to be reflected - which can ultimately mean the maps cause more confusion than they solve for visitors. Digital maps have the advantage that they can be updated quickly right up to, or even during, the event

• Searchable - Even for smaller events that can manage to fit most pertinent information on a printed map, it still leaves the user needing to read through potentially dozens of pieces of information before they find what they’re looking for, something that can quickly become tedious, particularly if the attendee in question has a shopping list of specific booths to visit and needs to find every one, note their locations, then try to figure out how to visit each of them efficiently without walking back and forth repeatedly across the event floor. All of these issues are resolved by a digital map that’s twinned with a searchable directory
• Multi-functional - With physical or printed maps, their usage begins and ends with the map itself. With digital mapping systems, the map can serve as a foundation for other systems, including indoor navigation (to help users go directly from their current location to a specific booth), geofencing (to alert users that a talk is about to start near to their location), analytics, and more

What are some of the core use cases for event mapping and navigation?

As indoor mapping and navigation systems continue to evolve and improve, so do the use cases that different events are able to find for them. However, here are some of the popular and emerging use cases that we at Pointr have observed whilst mapping some of the world’s biggest events and conferences:

• Navigating between sessions in limited time - Often, to account for the generally limited time a conference will run, multiple stages will run sessions nearly back-to-back. For the attendee aiming to go to multiple talks, having the ability to quickly navigate between stages or rooms is a must-have

• Finding specific exhibitors - As we’ve covered above, for many modern conferences, the mere act of finding the areas, booths, or exhibitors you’re looking for can be a huge logistical challenge. An interactive map twinned with a digital directory, plus indoor navigation, can go a tremendous distance in helping to alleviate this major pain point. Furthermore, features that have been developed by Pointr for other verticals - such as the map my list functionality built primarily for retail use cases - can be adapted to enable users to select multiple booths or exhibitors, then be routed in the most efficient way from one to the next

• Location sharing - For many event attendees, the primary draw of attending major conferences is not the exhibitors or the talks, but the ability to network with fellow attendees. One way maps and location services can enable this is via real-time location sharing between attendees. Though offered by other services such as WhatsApp, the limitations of these services to work effectively indoors (and their inability to display indoor maps) means a dedicated indoor location sharing system can be the difference between attendees finding one another easily, and time-consuming, frustrating wandering

• Event analytics - Even some of the world’s biggest events can come and go in a flash. Whereas locations such as hospitals, airports, or retail environments have the luxury of months or even years in which to analyze their visitors’ behavior and tweaks and adapt their layouts accordingly, event organizers tend to be so busy during the limited period of the event itself that they have little time to analyze things such as the flow of visitors around the event floor, potentially underutilized areas, or issues users are having finding certain areas or points of interest. With an analytics-enabled indoor location system, data can be reviewed retroactively, such as adapting the layout of future events to better funnel users to certain areas, or during the event to make tweaks, such as identifying any common map directory searches that aren’t resulting in users finding what they’re looking for and adding new search synonyms to help

Do you have an event or conference that needs maps or indoor location?