Add floors to an Area

A building has floors, and a flat map cannot show which one somebody is on. So an Area of Interest can carry a list of them, and a visitor’s row then reads 📍 at Building A · Ground Floor rather than just the building.

In the editor the section is headed Elevation Layers — one layer per floor. The reader never sees that phrase: on their phone it says Ground Floor, Floor 2, or whatever you named it. This page uses floor for the thing a visitor stands on, and Elevation Layer for the row you are configuring.

⚠️ A floor is declared, not detected

This is the part that decides whether the feature works, so it comes first.

FriendTrack works out which floor somebody is on from air pressure, and air pressure is a continuous number. There is nothing in it that says this is the second storey — that mapping is what you supply. Each Elevation Layer is a name, a floor number, and a range of altitudes in metres, and a visitor is put on the floor whose range contains their measured altitude.

GPS altitude is not used, and cannot be: it is far too noisy to separate one storey from another. So if you do not declare the ranges, no floor is ever reported — the phone is not going to guess.

What you need before you start

Two things:

How high each floor is, relative to a single reference point, in metres. Storey heights are typically 3 to 4 metres, and a venue’s own drawings usually state them.
One reference point, at the entrance. Every altitude is relative to it. Pick the main entrance and treat it as zero.

Add them in the editor

Select the Area, open Elevation Layers, and expand it. The note says what it is for: define floor levels and altitude ranges, and it is optional.
Add a layer per floor. Each takes:
- Name — what the visitor reads. Ground Floor, Floor 2, Basement, Balcony. Use the venue’s own words.
- Floor # — the number, used for ordering.
- Min Altitude (m) and Max Altitude (m) — the range, relative to your reference.
Order them with the move controls so the list reads bottom to top.

Make the ranges meet without gaps and without overlaps. A gap is a height at which nobody is on any floor; an overlap is a height at which two floors both claim them. For 3.5-metre storeys from a ground floor at zero, ranges like -1.5 to 1.8, 1.8 to 5.3, 5.3 to 8.8 work: each starts where the last ended, and each is wide enough to absorb a metre of measurement noise.

Or capture them on site

Standing in the building is the easier way to get the numbers, and the app does the arithmetic.

Open the Map in the app on a Map you own, and start capturing floors.
The first screen tells you what to do: Stand at the venue entrance and set it as the 0 m reference. Every floor is measured relative to here, and this seeds an editable Ground floor. Do that first — everything else is relative to it.
Walk to each floor, stand still for a moment, and tap Capture this floor. Name it as you go.
Captured Areas and floors wait in a draft until you review and submit them; nothing is posted until you commit. See capture Areas and floors on site.

The reference point is the step people skip, and skipping it makes every floor wrong by the same offset — which is not visible in the editor and very visible to a visitor on the wrong storey.

What a visitor sees

Their own and their friends’ rows name the floor beside the Area — 📍 at Building A · Ground Floor.
Moving between floors produces a notification, under the same Area Alerts category as arrivals and subject to the same announced or quiet choice.
A Meeting Point in the Area can be pinned to one floor — pin a Meeting Point to a floor.

What to expect of the accuracy

Barometric altitude separates storeys well and is not certain. A lift, a stairwell, a door being held open, or a weather front moving through all shift the reading. So treat a reported floor as a strong hint rather than a fact, and do not build anything that depends on it being exact.

Practical consequence for you: do not declare floors narrower than about two metres, and do not try to distinguish a mezzanine from the floor below it.

When not to bother

Single-storey venues, and buildings where being on the wrong floor does not matter. Floors are worth the effort for a multi-storey venue where people genuinely lose each other between levels — a conference centre, a stadium, a shopping centre — and are pure overhead for a festival field.