A pitch experiment for Dubai’s Global Village. They wanted internal wayfinding — a Google-Maps-style routing experience for the venue itself, where you could pick where you are and where you want to go and get the shortest path through the actual layout: paths, pavilions, washrooms, food courts, the lot.
The auto-tracer
I built an auto-tracer that took the venue map and traced every internal path — main walkways, side routes, the membranes between pavilions — into a routable graph. Done naively this is a very manual job; the tracer turned it into something that could be re-run when the layout changed.
Layered overlays
I split the venue into stacked overlays — one layer for buildings, one for paths, one for washrooms, one for labelled landmarks, etc. Each layer fed into its own pipeline. To make tagging tractable I built custom tools for manual label entry and overlay editing so that whoever was on the ground could correct or extend the auto-traced output without touching code.
Outcome
It was a pitch. The project never moved forward, so it never deployed. The pipeline worked — auto-traced paths, generated routes, rendered an interactive 3D map — but stayed in the experiments drawer.