Digital wayfinding?

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muriqui's picture

Has anybody in this group had experience with deploying a campus digital wayfinding solution?

A little background on this question: we're in the middle of a campuswide wayfinding project—renaming roads, redesigning physical signage, etc.—and there's great interest in the project team around integrating this with our digital signage, mobile app, and website. We're already using Drupal as our standard Web platform, so I'm curious to know if a) it's feasible to build a wayfinding solution within Drupal and b) are there existing wayfinding systems that interoperate nicely with Drupal.

My ideal outcome for this would be to have a single CMS—either built in Drupal or another, wayfinding-specific platform—for managing maps and pathing data which could then be accessed as a Web service to provide the backend for multiple client-side apps, such as touchscreens in buildings, walking directions and guided tours through the mobile app, and building and room locators on the website.

Is this crazy ambitious or has it been done before? Thanks for any input you can provide!

Comments

Hi Muriqui - I did something

Jeana_with_a_j's picture

Hi Muriqui -

I did something kind of like this when I worked at University of Kentucky. You can see a screenshot of it here:
http://jeanaclark.org/web/index.php#GattonSignage. Ours was more event based, and less way-finding, but maybe this will help you get a few ideas.

It was put together with a custom tpl file, that pulled in a couple of content types:
1. General Announcement: These would go in the big area where the graphic is now, sometimes they were just an image (hold over from powerpoint days), or it could be a text description.

  1. Calendar: This fed the event ticker on the right. This also allowed us to generate a calendar on our website as well, and events had a fields that asked "Add this to the signage ticker" and "Add this as a general announcement" Each option would show only certain fields on the signage from the event.

  2. The stock ticker was a hacked rss feed from yahoo, I couldn't find a stock ticker that worked well with Drupal.

  3. The date/time and weather were from other Drupal Modules.

When I left we had began looking at opening the calendar up to a wider audience for event submissions and then would enable moderation/workbench for work flow.

I've since moved on and that project died.