The Campus Navigation Problem
How might we create an intelligent campus navigation experience?
The problem
Where students run into it today.
Block, floor, wing, room. Four unknowns in your first week.
Why it matters
Outdoor map services stop at the building entrance. Almost all of the confusion happens after that.
The people who need this most — new students, visitors, anyone with a mobility constraint — are the least likely to ask for directions.
Indoor positioning is a real technical problem with several credible approaches and no obvious winner, which makes it worth actually investigating.
Possible directions
Several credible approaches, no obvious winner. Choosing between them is part of the work.
QR waypoints
Cheap, robust, no positioning stack required. Scan a code at a junction, get directions from there. Unglamorous and likely to work.
Indoor mapping
Model floors as connected graphs and route between them, including lifts, ramps and accessible paths.
Visual localisation
Recognise where someone is from a camera frame. The most interesting option and the most likely to fail — which is why it belongs in a research track.
Technologies & difficulty
Several moving parts that have to agree with each other — an API, a store, a frontend. The difficulty lives in the seams.
Difficulty describes the work, not the person. A level 04 problem is not closed to a first-year — it just needs a team and a longer runway.
Potential project
Smart Campus Navigation
An indoor routing experience that gets a person from a campus entrance to a specific room, with accessible-path awareness.
No team has taken this on yet.
Skills needed
Open roles & possible team
- Frontend
Routing interface, offline behaviour, one-handed use
- Design
Wayfinding language and accessible route presentation
- Backend
Map graph, waypoint registry, floor data
Research questions
The things nobody in the group can currently answer.
How accurate does indoor positioning have to be before it beats a printed sign?
What does an accessible route mean in a building that was not designed with one?
Can a navigation interface work with one hand, in a corridor, while late?
Next steps
What the first two weeks would sensibly look like.
- 1
Map one building completely. One good floor plan beats a partial model of the whole campus.
- 2
Prototype the QR approach first — it sets the bar every clever approach has to beat.