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Wayfinding SDK - Indoor Mapping for Universities and Colleges
Feb 10, 2022
8 min read
With Mappedin's SDKs, colleges and universities can create a completely custom mapping and navigation system that can make students, parents, and faculty members feel at ease. Integrated with additional technology, campuses can offer virtual tours, appointment booking, and the ability to reserve parking spots and study spaces directly from the map.
College & University Mapping, Navigation & Positioning SDK
Mappedin's Mobile and Web SDKs provide you with the core elements of a digital map and campus wayfinding experience. As a flexible solution, you can integrate your campus map with your university or college’s mobile application, or harness our SDKs to create your own custom mapping and navigation system. When integrated with indoor positioning systems, our SDKs unlock even more powerful experiences and provide helpful turn-by-turn directions inside of and in between your campus buildings.
How Does It Work?
Built on top of existing libraries (existing packages of code), Mappedin SDKs enable a seamless user experience. With well-documented resources for all features and components offered across iOS, Android, and Web, building your own campus mapping experience is simple. Our documentation offers step-by-step guides on getting started, details on how to connect our code to your application through sample apps, and descriptions of individual codes and functions. Mappedin's Integrations team provides ongoing developer support, and is dedicated to the evolution of our SDKs and their successful implementations.
Advantages for Developers
With 24/7 support, how-to guides, demonstration applications, comprehensive API documentation, and access to Release Roadmap and Version Migration Guides, Mappedin ensures that you have the tools required to build a unique college and university mapping experience that fits seamlessly into your brand strategy.
Mappedin's SDKs are highly integrable with other datasets and integrations, and we offer developers the flexibility to use React Native for Android and iOS devices through the same platform. This makes SDKs easily accessible to all, and can be a more cost efficient option with fast development incentives. Mappedin's dedication to customer success ensures a continual improvement of our developer tools and an expansion of SDK capabilities.
Benefits of Indoor and Outdoor Mapping SDK for Universities and Colleges
Building an interactive campus wayfinding experience with Mappedin's SDKs enables students to easily locate buildings and the rooms and services within them, while delivering valuable insights back to your college or university. With a powerful search engine and maps that function across any device, finding an upcoming class or food vendor becomes stress-free. Colleges and universities can also highlight on-campus events and promotions with the digital map, thereby increasing visibility and student engagement.
Enhanced Campus Experience
Enhance your campus experience by helping students, parents, and faculty members familiarize themselves with your college or university. Up-to-date interactive maps help students adjust to campus life, while eliminating campus navigation challenges. You can also customize maps to match your school's branding, ensuring a seamless digital experience for anyone visiting your campus.
Find Your Way
Indoor maps are extremely useful for helping staff, students, and visitors find their way around large university and college campuses. This digital tool enables you to search and locate lecture halls, residence buildings, study spaces, food vendors, bookstores, and additional services on-the-go from the comfort of your mobile device. For instance, Mohawk College allows students to search for classroom codes and populate directions directly to their classrooms. As an effective interactive wayfinding solution, students can also pre-plan routes to find the perfect walkways that allow them to plan their timetable in advance.
Step-by-step navigation
By integrating campus maps with indoor positioning, you can provide the most accurate and efficient route for users. Students and visitors can see their real-time position moving on the map as they follow step-by-step directions, ensuring a seamless wayfinding experience. With multi-stop wayfinding, users can enter more than one destination for their journey, and the map will display the shortest route between the desired multiple stops.
Points-of-interest (POIs)
Universities and colleges have complete control of the relevant points of interest (POIs) located across their campuses. Different schools may have different points of interest, also known as "places and things" which could include landmarks, statues, plaques, or locations of historical importance. Campuses may also choose to display the most popular or important amenities and facilities on the map using standout icons. For instance, to highlight the position of restrooms, elevators, or fire exits.
Stay Informed
Along with providing at-a-glance information regarding the placement of amenities, campus buildings, services, and more, mapping SDKs can be used to display location details. Similar to wayfinding SDKs for malls, users can click locations on the map to view information such as hours, descriptions, photos, contact info, and any other relevant data. Campuses can even include important links on the map, such as a bookstore's website, a reservation link for a study space, or the menu for an on-campus restaurant.
Maps can also be used to keep students, visitors, and staff updated on campus news and events by highlighting the location of time-sensitive events, such as a job fair. With the ability to layer on real-time push notifications, details such as lecture cancellations, changed meeting times and locations, wifi-details, parking information, and campus news can easily be relayed to individuals on campus.
Put Safety First
Campus safety is always of utmost importance. Indoor maps can be used to highlight emergency exits, fire extinguishers, and campus security to make students feel safe in their environment. Paired with indoor positioning, colleges and universities can improve safety measures by sending emergency notifications to individuals in specific locations. For instance, anyone located within a certain building can receive an alert notifying them to evacuate immediately through the emergency exits highlighted on the campus map.
Seamless Outdoor-Indoor Wayfinding
Campuses can be extremely confusing, with buildings and facilities spread out in all directions. With Mappedin's indoor outdoor navigation and wayfinding, staff, students, and visitors can avoid confusion and easily navigate between and within buildings, floors, and both the indoor and outdoor components of the campus.
Advanced Accessibility
To fit the varying needs of staff and students, it's important to have an indoor mapping solution that is AODA compliant and supports multiple languages. With Mappedin's Accessibility Mode, your digital campus maps can provide users with accessible routes that prioritize elevators, ramps over stairs and escalators. Whether they’re using a mobile phone, laptop, iPad, or digital directory, everyone can find tailored directions to their desired location with the same look, feel, and function regardless of device.
Mappedin's products have been deployed globally, and we strive to support as many languages as possible to ensure inclusivity at your college or university. You can better accommodate students by enabling them to set their language preferences on the campus map.
Real-time Campus Management
Mappedin’s CMS is the foundational layer for your interactive campus map experience. The Map Creator makes it simple to edit location information and alter the appearance of your campus map when locations shift or new buildings are added. Edits made within the CMS will reflect across all platforms, from school websites to a college or university app. The Analytics Dashboard shows valuable data on user searches, category selections, device usage, and more.
Flexible Maps That Are Easy to Set Up
All iOS, Android, and Web SDKs are both well-documented and well-resourced. This means that building and rolling out a unique indoor mapping experience for your university or college is simple and intuitive at all stages of design and creation. No experience is required to get started with building your first indoor mapping experience; simply follow the step-by-step guides provided.
Use Your Map in Your Mobile, Web, and Kiosk Apps
There are no device limitations when building your indoor navigation application with Mappedin's wayfinding SDKs and APIs, and the solution can be deployed across mobile, web, and kiosk applications. This might include an app for students, digital directories on campus, or maps displayed on the campus student portal for easy access.
Web SDK
Mappedin’s Web SDK has been leveraged to build applications across platforms. Whether you are integrating indoor mapping alongside a digital signage application on building directories, or creating a custom application, the Web SDK is what Mappedin’s own pre-built applications are built on, meaning its capabilities are constantly expanding.
iOS & Android SDKs
To create a mobile experience for iOS and Android devices, a Mobile SDK is the ideal solution. Universities and colleges can integrate digital campus maps into their existing mobile applications, or can choose to build their own app experiences using Mappedin's iOS SDK and Android SDK. Alternatively, schools may opt to use the React Native SDK to build once and deploy across both device types, saving time and effort.
How to Make the Most of our Wayfinding SDK for Universities and Colleges
While interactive campus map software can be used primarily as an interactive wayfinding solution for colleges and universities, it can also provide additional capabilities. For instance, it can be integrated into existing applications, or layered with other software and services to build a completely unique digital experience.
More About Wayfinding SDK for Universities and Colleges
You can implement custom features and applications including virtual tours, contact monitoring, reserving available parking spots and study spaces, push notifications, and more. Regardless of the end-user, mapping SDKs can easily work with your latest software and devices, and unlock powerful map and navigation experiences for any use case.
For further documentation on our SDKs, visit our Developer Portal. To start creating a campus wayfinding experience with Mappedin’s SDKs, contact us today.