The University of Oulu
Indoor Navigation and Positioning Application
2 campuses / 220 000 m2 in one wayfinding solution
About University of Oulu
The University of Oulu, founded in 1958, is an international science university that creates innovation for the future, well-being, and knowledge through research and education. The complex and maze-like Linnanmaa campus is expanding to amount 150,000 square meters of floor area and Kontinkangas campus around 70,000 square meters. The university stands a total of 220,000 square meters, has more than 16,000 students, and 3,000 employees, and therefore it’s one of the biggest and the most multidisciplinary universities in Finland.
Why Indoor navigation was necessary?
Students and visitors coming to the vast campus unfamiliar with the facilities and services available
Original room codes within the university were made based on the unique locations of faculties, and once different faculties have moved, the room codes confuse users and don’t have the original intended meaning
A lot of siloed, single-use geospatial data maintained by individual users for one use case such as:
campus pdf map for website
lecture room location illustrations per course
services map
printer locations map
It seemed that Indoor navigation and position application could solve the challenges at hand.
Results
Oulu Campus Navigator is a mobile navigation and indoor positioning application. The application shows the user’s location on a map, the location of all the rooms, and it navigates to the desired destination.
The positioning and the app’s map base can be used as a platform for other services and in research. The digital map of the campus also works as a platform to create new digital services and enhances the quality of existing services such as catering and maintenance.
One of the critical features of the Steerpath indoor navigation solution has been the open map platform that is enabling the whole campus to share one common dataset.
The shared dataset can be used by any application within the university to retrieve the latest information where different types of spaces are located, what services are available, and where.
With the introduction of unified, a shared dataset, the university has saved both on maintenance work thanks to advanced and easy to use map management tools as well as removing the need for maintaining individual maps for each use case.