Draw an Area
An Area of Interest is a named part of your venue — a stage, a bar, a lift queue, a car park. Drawing them is what turns somewhere on the map into at the food court, and it is what an arrival notification names.
They are optional. A calibrated Map with no Areas works; it just cannot describe anywhere.
Before you draw anything
Calibrate first. Areas are drawn onto the image, and if you correct the calibration afterwards the Areas stay where you drew them on the picture while the world moves under them. Get calibration to Good, then draw.
The three tools
On the Map’s Areas of Interest tab, the toolbar has four buttons — one to select, three to draw:
| Tool | How it works | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Select / Edit areas | Click an Area to select and edit it | Everything after drawing |
| Draw polygon — click to place vertices, double-click to close | Click each corner, double-click the last | Anything with a real shape: a field, a building, a fenced enclosure |
| Draw circle — click center, drag to set radius | Click the middle, drag out | A stage, a bar, a mast, a meeting spot — anything you think of as “around here” |
| Draw rectangle — click and drag | Drag one corner to the other | Car parks, marquees, courts, stalls in a row |
Reach for the circle more often than you expect. Most venue features are a place, not a precisely bounded region, and a circle takes two clicks against a polygon’s dozen. Use polygons where the boundary genuinely matters — where being inside and outside are different, like a fenced arena.
Do it
- Pick the tool.
- Draw on the image, roughly at first. It does not have to be exact and you can adjust it after.
- Name it, and give it an icon — name an Area and give it an icon.
- Decide whether arrivals there are announced — announced or quiet — and whether the label is always shown — labels: always, or only on demand.
- Save. It appears in the Areas list beside the map, which is where you find it again.
How big to draw them
Slightly larger than the thing itself. Two reasons:
- A phone’s Position is accurate to a few metres, so an Area drawn exactly to a stage’s footprint will report people standing at its edge as outside it.
- An arrival is more useful than a precise boundary. At the main stage is what somebody wants to read; being technically two metres outside it serves nobody.
Do not overlap Areas heavily. A person inside two Areas produces two descriptions of one place, and the venue starts reading as noise.
An Area does not move when GPS drifts
Worth knowing, because it comes up as a suspicion: Areas are drawn against the image, in its own pixels, and stay exactly where you put them. What varies is where a person is placed, which depends on their phone’s fix and on your calibration. So an Area that seems to have moved has not — either the calibration changed, or the positions being drawn into it are poor.
Editing and deleting
Switch to Select / Edit areas and click one. You get its name, description, colour, its settings and a delete control. Deleting an Area removes it from the Map for everybody who installs it afterwards — people already on an older Map Version keep what they have.
Next
- Add floors to an Area, for a multi-storey building
- Capture Areas and floors on site, to walk the boundaries instead of drawing them