Unlocking Point-To-Point Wayfinding On Our Maps
At Envoy, we’re in the process of building our next-generation digital signage platform: Envoy Screens. One of the most exciting features currently in beta is our point-to-point wayfinding for our Maps app.
The idea is simple: it's easy to get lost in large workplaces. Our Maps on Screens app unlocks realtime wayfinding, imagine walking up to a touchscreen in your workplace, tapping “Directions,” and instantly getting a clear walking path from where you are to where you need to be. Your destination can be a meeting room, your desk, or the coffee machine that fuels your day.
Currently, our map lives inside our Ember.js dashboard frontend, rendered via Leaflet.js. As part of these changes, we've added the ability to draw walking routes as polylines right on the map. On the backend we receive a start and end longitude/latitude pair which we use to calculate the most optimal, realistic walking path in milliseconds. Speed matters here, no one wants to stand in the hallway waiting for a loading spinner.
We tried some clever (and slightly crazy) approaches early on. Our first idea was to take the PNG floor plans our users upload, use a histogram to detect the most common color, assume that color is the floor, set that color to white, make everything else black, and convert it into a matrix (0 = walkable, 1 = obstacle). Unfortunately real floor plans have text, colors, emojis, doors, etc., all contributing to broken paths. Large images also made route computation painfully slow.
So, we went simpler: let customers manually draw their walkable routes. This gave them full control and avoided guesswork. We also sped up performance dramatically by breaking routes into intersections instead of computing every single point within the polyline.
In the future we might blend these ideas, potentially automatically generating an initial guess for routes and letting customers tweak them. We could even use AI models to detect walkways and generate routes.
If you’re an Envoy customer and want to test the wayfinding within our Maps on Screens app, reach out to your customer success manager, we’d love your feedback!