You Have (Almost) Arrived at Your Destination: Continuing the Map from Outdoor to Indoor Spaces

Maps – whether etched in clay, paper, or the digital versions we pull up on our phones – have been tools across empires, civilizations, and cities to make sense of the world. While most roads, sidewalks, and trails have been mapped repeatedly for users to navigate and chart their paths, maps have historically ended abruptly once entering an indoor space. This phenomenon treats indoor spaces as destinations or landmarks rather than a continuation of one’s journey. In reality, travelers often need to navigate numerous entrances and exits, stairs and elevator banks, and multiple floors to reach their final destination.

Mapping indoor spaces, such as buildings and other enclosed structures, can link the outdoor and indoor worlds and make our journeys much easier to navigate. This effort also lays the groundwork for many new robotic and autonomous technologies to use the seamless transition between the natural and physical built environments for training AI, augmented and virtual reality, and other innovative technologies down the road.

The most immediate impact of indoor mapping is solving common wayfinding issues. There’s perhaps no greater example of a complex indoor space in North America than the Millennium Garages in downtown Chicago, which also happens to be the testbed for City Tech Collaborative’s Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab . Stretched across 3.8 million square feet (roughly 660 football fields!) and providing access to the heart of Chicago’s commercial and cultural center, the number one challenge garage users face is being able to navigate to and from Millennium Garages’ 36 gated entries/exits and hundreds of pedestrian access points across four interconnected garages to the many neighboring destinations.

“Visitors choose Millennium Garages because we are located right in downtown Chicago and connect to businesses, tourist destinations, and local shopping,” said Issac Riggs, COO of Millennium Garages. “However, with an expansive and connected underground network such as the Garages, traditional signage can only go so far to point people in the right direction. We’re looking forward to solving this challenge with City Tech.”

Mapping garage networks not only solves wayfinding obstacles for visitors, but it also sets the stage for the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab’s other goals of transforming parking facilities into multi-modal hubs, finding creative uses for large indoor spaces, and to test and validate parking technology solutions that can be scaled.

This is where HERE Technologies steps in. As a worldwide leader in connected location services, HERE is bridging the outdoor and indoor worlds through a single mapping platform. HERE has already helped thousands of building owners across 90 countries to map their indoor spaces. Example building types include shopping malls, airports, corporate campuses, industrial plants and complex parking garages. Equipped with HERE Indoor Maps, building owners can optimize space usage, manage and track assets and offer wayfinding solutions that seamlessly connect the outdoor and indoor worlds. Given the capabilities of HERE, City Tech partnered with Millennium Garages and HERE to create a digital indoor map of the Millennium Garages’ Lakeside Garage as a foundational effort for City Tech’s Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab. These maps were created with the intent to solve wayfinding challenges of today and push the needle towards advanced applications for the maps, including incorporation into future parking and mobility solutions.

"The maps created provide a true end-to-end, location enabled, personal user experience throughout the journey,” said Gerhard Boiciuc, Senior Product Manager at HERE Technologies. “They also serve as the location fabric to create enhanced wayfinding and functions as integrated car parking and EV charging recommendations.”

Millennium Garages’ complexity provides examples of wayfinding challenges experienced in cities globally; with its size and central location, Millennium Garages serves multiple user groups including tourists, nearby residents, and downtown employees. Any solutions to wayfinding in the garages – and any large indoor space – also need to take into consideration the user-specific wayfinding challenges facing each of these groups such as non-native English speakers and people with disabilities. To address these challenges in Millennium Garages and consider scalable opportunities for indoor wayfinding, City Tech hosted a roundtable of parking and mobility experts along with community and disability advocates in November 2020 to incorporate user-centered design feedback into the development process for the indoor maps.

Cities must be accessible for everyone; therefore, it is critical that the disability community have a voice and be reflected in accessible wayfinding. Representatives from Access Living, a Center for Independent Living, noted the challenges facing Chicagoans with disabilities, specifically mentioned accessibility features and providing real-time service updates for elevator and escalator closures for those that need to plan their journeys in advance.

“As a blind woman, wayfinding in general can be really challenging,” said Ashley Eisenmenger, Public Relations Coordinator at Access Living. “Having the ability to receive real-time updates and information would make the process of getting from point A to point B much smoother.”

The Grant Park Advisory Council gave insights on the need to direct garage users to the parking spots that are closest to their intended destination. In the case of a special event, these parking recommendations could help ease traffic in and out of the garage. Choose Chicago echoed the need for further knowledge sharing, specifically between tourists and the sites they plan to visit.

Looking beyond parking, we also anticipate changes to the way we interact within indoor spaces in a pandemic and post-pandemic world ; this necessitates an even more urgent need for our collective understanding of how to navigate indoor spaces and create a baseline for technology to aid these customer-focused responses.

City Tech Collaborative will use insights from the roundtable and the created maps in future solutions within the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab to improve visitors’ journeys, set the stage for additional solutions, and better integrate the parking industry as an expansion of mobility systems in cities worldwide. Parking facilities have infinite potential – whether serving as flexible business space, freight and logistics centers, or multi-modal transit hubs, mapping indoor spaces lays a foundation for new solutions to connect parking facilities to the outdoor world.

Join the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab to shape the future of the parking industry and urban mobility. We’re integrating parking more fully into urban transportation systems, developing tech-enabled solutions for smart infrastructure management, and cultivating value-added services and space uses. Reach out to Collaborate@CityTech.org to learn more and build upon our existing work.

About City Tech Collaborative (City Tech): City Tech is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. City Tech’s work uses IoT sensing networks, advanced analytics, and urban design to create scalable, market ready solutions. Current initiatives address advanced mobility, healthy cities, connected infrastructure, and emerging growth opportunities. City Tech was born and raised in Chicago, and every city is a potential partner. Visit www.CityTech.org and follow us on Twitterand LinkedIn.