Finding your way around on the first day of school can be a daunting task, especially at B.C.'s expansive Simon Fraser University campus.
The Surrey campus is all located inside one building, which sounds simple, but it's split into four different areas and also attached to a shopping mall and an office tower.
"It has a lot of nooks and crannies," Justine Bizzochi, SFU's technology manager said of the campus' unusual architecture.
Unhappy with the current printed maps, recent grads Matt Jeffrey and Gordon Manson began developing a location finder as a school project in September 2007.
Now completed, the university has placed their device on the mezzanine level of the Surrey complex.
The device is a large, interactive, touch sensitive map. Once you choose your location it will appear on the map -- in 3D.
"Picture if you will entering into a mall and you have a static map that you need to find a store except our system would come to life with rich multi-media content," Manson explains.
Once you put in your desired location, the map will give you back results in real time, and provide you the simplest route.
"It's a green path drawn for you that you can visually see on the map," Manson said.
"On the left hand side you can actually see what the classroom looks like."
A visitor to the campus can also search according to the event they are attending which, as Jeffrey explains, is linked to the SFU events RSS feed so it automatically updates with what's happening on campus.
Third year student Evan Gordanier says he would have found the device extremely useful on his first day of school.
"I like the idea because you know where you're going in advance," Gordanier said.
"For a first year student, it's still confusing though; it would be good to have it on a portable device."
Both Jeffrey and Manson agree, and would like to eventually extend the concept on to smartphone platforms so that students could use the interactive maps on the go.
The pair built the device from scratch and hope to build more.
With help from SFU's Venture Connection program they have turned their school project into a business venture called MapT Media. They are hoping other educational institutions will embrace their idea, as well as large facilities like malls and stadiums.
"What we're trying to do is alleviate that load on other people and to speed up people's times to get to where they need to go," Manson says.
Manson and Jeffery both say they are very proud of the location finder.
"We hope to keep adding more developments and improvements to it over time," Manson adds.
"We want to make it better for our users to get to where they are going quickly."
