If the Wayfinding paths have been set up in a building, Situm is able to compute a route from any point A to any point B, and to provide turn-by-turn instructions as the user advances through the route. What does this mean?


Wayfinding paths

Wayfinding Paths (or just Paths) are graphs that represent all the navigation routes within the building. Like you can see in the following figure, the graph is composed of a set of nodes and links, where the links represent that there is a passable path between two nodes.


Situm paths are very flexible, enabling the following configurations:  

  • "Non-accesible" links (not suitable for a wheelchair, for instance).
  • Floor-change nodes (allowing to specify where a floor change may take place, e.g. elevator).
  • Link custom tags, special tags that allow to request routes that include/exclude them. For instance, a link may be tagged as "private" and one may request a route excluding all "private" links.
  • etc


Routes

A route is nothing but a series of ordered points and links of the Paths: each point represents a location of the route and each link a straight line that connects two consecutive points. The user then moves from the beginning to the end of the route by traversing all the paths in order.


Provided that the user is in a building configured with Situm (Indoor Location), Situm can compute the shortest route to anywhere within that building: specific coordinates, points of interest, etc. For example, in the following figure we represent the shortest route from A to B computed from the Paths of the building (see Section Paths).



Turn-by-turn indications

Situm provides the route in a data format that makes it very easy to represent in your user interface. 

  1. As a set of displacements (straight lines) that the user has to follow. These lines can be represented on top of the floorplan of the building.
  2. As a set of instructions ("Advance 100 meters", "Turn right", etc.) that can be displayed in text or as voice commands (using the Android/iOS standard text-to-speech utilities).


For instance, in the following figure the user has computed a route from its location (blue arrow) to a point of interest (shop icon). The route is represented as a dotted line and the first instructions are shown ("Go ahead for 10 meters", then "Turn left").