The Evolution of Pointr’s Revolutionary Mapping Technology

The story so far

Developing highly accurate indoor positioning and pathfinding technology, capable of deploying digital maps instantly and at scale, has been an intensely challenging yet rewarding journey for the Pointr team.

Our journey started back in 2014, and since then many of our competitors have found the challenge too hard and simply given up. By contrast, we persevered and have now perfected proprietary pathfinding and digital mapping algorithms that make our indoor location solution the number one choice of Fortune 100 companies.

We remain committed to providing the best possible indoor location experience to visitors, customers, and employees in large venues such as corporate campuses, large smart hospitals, healthcare centers, and retail outlets.

As we move towards launching V7 of Pointr Maps, we look back at some of what we’ve achieved so far. We also give you a sneak peek at a ground-breaking feature that truly sets our upcoming release apart from anything you’ve experienced with indoor mapping to date.

Every challenge has a solution

Here are some of the challenges we’ve faced on our journey so far, and how we overcame them with our current indoor mapping solution.

Challenge	Solved by
Speed - quickly digitize large buildings such as corporate campuses, retail outlets, hospitals, and airports, with multiple buildings, floors, and venues.	Pointr MapScale® lightning-fast AutoCAD file conversion - our smart algorithms digitize CAD floorplan files into user-friendly, interactive vector maps, and our easy-to-configure map standards allow us to digitize thousands of venues at lightning speed.
Scalable & Multi-platform – digitize and maintain floorplans even at a huge scale across multi-platforms, regardless of whether the customer has 1,000 or 100,000 maps to process.	Pointr MapScale® processes 1,000s floorplans in minutes across platforms (iOS, Android, Web, and kiosks) while our competitors would typically take months to process this volume.
Accuracy - aligning indoor and outdoor environments on a digital map can be a challenge for large venues with multiple buildings on-site, especially for new buildings. With imprecisely marked locations on the maps (e.g. entrances), it can cause issues for delivery and wayfinding services when transitioning between indoors and outdoors.	Pointr MapScale® aligns digital maps with the true geo-coordinates in the real world. We cross-reference multiple mapping sources to ensure the accuracy of our digital maps and enable seamless indoor-outdoor transitioning.
Seamless floor transitions can be challenging if your app is constantly switching between different maps – it's important to ensure transitions between floors are smooth and intuitive for an optimal user experience.	Pointr Maps provide a single world view that automatically detects when changing floors and buildings, allowing the users to see their real-time location and navigate between floors at ease.
Customizable – focus on ease of use and deliver beautifully designed interactive digital maps that are simple and accurate, allowing users to easily make updates and changes of the map context in a single control center.	Pointr Cloud Map Designer lets users customize geofencing zones, points of interest (add/edit) or add overlays for air and lighting zones and amenities on our maps.
Easy to Update – make sure maps are kept consistently up to date to best serve visitors, customers, and employees.	Our mapping SDK can automatically update changes to facilities, layouts, POI (Points of Interest), and geofenced zones within 10 - 15 minutes across platforms. What’s even better: our mapping SDK detects and flags all the major changes for manual review and approval to ensuring the maps stay relevant and in sync with physical venues at all times.
Software agnostic – it's important to make sure your indoor location solutions can be integrated with 3rd party software or IoT systems to future proof your venue and ensure business continuity.	Pointr remains and will always remain map agnostic as we continue to work with our mapping partners. Our system is integration-friendly and able to integrate with 3rd party IoT systems and any existing mapping platform and vendor.
Cost-effective – deliver value for money with automation and client control.	We don't charge for maintenance and updating of maps - everything can be done automatically by simply updating the auto-CAD files to Pointr Cloud Map Designer.
Flexible - make it easy to export map data for use in other applications to deliver maximum return on investment.	Pointr cloud allows users to export maps and map data in PNG, SVG, and CSV format with a single click.
Brand friendly – help our customers market themselves with maps specifically tailored to their brand. Deliver a consistent branding experience to end-users.	Our mapping standards are easy to configure which is in stark contrast to our competitors. This allows us to produce bespoke maps to match any brand without affecting performance when generating or rendering maps onscreen.

Our hard work has been rewarded

The challenges on the road to where we are today have been substantial, but so have the rewards.

Want to learn everything there is to know about indoor mapping? Download our guide.

We recently worked with a leading workplace experience and facility management company, to create digital maps that enable IoT and smart workplace solutions across 4 million ft² (400,000 m²) of office space in 12 countries using our automated mapping software MapScale®.

With our Deep Location® platform, building occupants and visitors get the only scalable digital mapping and location solution available using their own applications for iOS and Android via a dashboard.

Other notable successes include:

Retail - Pointr is live in a major U.S. department store retailer across 1,000 locations with more than 9 million ft²retail floor space and millions of mobile application users. We have helped accelerate their original mapping process from 2 years per store to 2,000 venues in weeks. We are also partners with other worldwide household names in retail.
Corporate campus/workplace – we work with Fortune 100 companies across IT and Tech, financial, and management consultancy. We’ve digitized more than 6.96 million ft² of office space with more upcoming deployment around the world.
Healthcare/hospitals – we are a trusted partner of major healthcare institutions and hospitals across the globe. Pointr has worked with UCHealth’s Anschutz Medical Campus to help patients and visitors visualize their route from the parking lot to the desired indoor location. In large hospitals, navigating parking lots, public areas, and hallways can be stressful but Pointr ensures the journey is as convenient as possible.
Smart city - Pointr Maps provides the most scalable location tech that enables the world's most sophisticated deployment ever. The project is located in a peninsula in Hong Kong with extremely complicated environments such as an indoor-outdoor campus, sophisticated high ceilings, open atrium buildings. Our highly scalable Deep Location® Platform can digitize venues on a large scale, even a city!

A quick sneak peek at V7 of our Mobile SDK

While we don’t want to steal the thunder from the upcoming launch of our Pointr Maps V7, there’s one special feature we want to share with you that has the potential to change the way visitors, customers, and employees experience large venues.

3D maps – another first from the Pointr Team

The extra dimension that comes with the introduction of 3D maps in V7 means we can present a truly immersive wayfinding experience to the user.

With the addition of definitive details such as landmarks, users are now able to browse and understand a venue faster and more easily than ever before.

The introduction of 3D maps also gives us the scope we need to deliver an even more intuitive, beautiful, and pleasing experience to the user and enhance brand awareness and loyalty as a result.

We see the Pointr 3D maps experience as a transition between the 2D world and an augmented world full of exciting possibilities for our users.

Key updates in our new Pointr Maps V7:

3D map rendering from Pointr has arrived!

Zoom into your 3D maps in detail and make your venues come to life. Pointr's interactive 3D maps support mobile and web map widgets with 2D/3D views, compliant with intuitive search, wayfinding, and geofencing notifications.

Seamless campus navigation experience with smooth indoor-outdoor transitions

It's hard to get indoor-outdoor map transitions done accurately and smoothly. Pointr Maps V7 allows you to sync your indoor maps with outdoor world maps simultaneously, enabling your users to scroll across an entire campus and between buildings without glitchy cropped views.

More flexible mapping with smart objects

With Pointr Map V7, you can mark your objects/ facilities with coordinates within the map. This new feature lets you drag and drop the layer objects if you need to merge two floors/venues into one, upgrading your venues to more flexibility.

Easy Customization and Integration

Inside your app, your developers can easily customize your map with custom point-of-interest UI treatments, menus, and actions. Pointr exposes external identifiers for all map elements, so you can easily reference third-party systems within the context of the map.

Parting thoughts

At Pointr, our focus has always been on providing the best possible indoor location experience to visitors, customers, and employees in large venues.

We’ve developed an industry-leading indoor mapping solution that not only digitizes and maintains thousands of maps automatically at scale (MapScale®) but does so at a speed that none of our competitors can match.

The introduction of Pointr’s Maps V7 marks the next exciting phase in our indoor positioning and pathfinding journey.

We'd like you to join us!