By Shannon Horning and Abigail Bao
A screenshot of CMUMap’s interface. The tool shows the fastest route from Fairfax Apartments to Porter Hall, allowing you to cut through buildings. Shannon Horning/ SciTech Editor
As a first-year student, I dedicated my first day at college to wandering through the unfamiliar campus, doing my best to map out the buildings and piece together the paths to my classrooms. I spent hours walking around, getting lost amongst the labyrinth buildings and scouting floors, often only to find the room I was searching for on an entirely different level. Now, in my third year, I’ve grown familiar with Carnegie Mellon’s odd layout and have shifted my attention to optimizing my routes, especially now that I live further away. While Google Maps can’t guide me on which buildings I can cut through to get to my 9:30 a.m. writing class faster, there’s an application that can.
CMUMaps is an interactive navigational software tailored to Carnegie Mellon’s campus, offering features beyond standard tools like Google Maps. It provides detailed floor plans of campus buildings, room-level navigation, and personalized route calculations. If you need to find your classroom, simply upload your schedule from Student Information Online, and CMUMaps will determine the fastest route to the exact room, even suggesting shortcuts through buildings. The tool also helps you locate and navigate to restaurants, events, study spaces, and even restrooms.
The tool was created by students from the Labrador Committee of ScottyLabs, Carnegie Mellon’s largest software development club, and developers of other projects such as the course browser CMU Courses and CMUEats. The Tartan spoke to two members of the committee, third-year Theo Urban and second-year Yuxiang Huang, to learn more about the motivations behind the project and how it was developed.
“The map existed before [I joined],” Urban explained. “There was an exchange student from Switzerland — his name is Nicola who created an interactive map, like what you see now in CMUMaps minus the navigation and the features, like clicking on rooms and buildings.”
Urban joined the CMUMaps project during his sophomore year, motivated by both personal experiences and the intellectual challenge the project presented. “I’m a bigger Google Maps user than a lot of people are because I find its social features and the way it displays information very compelling,” he said. After navigating Carnegie Mellon’s campus during his first-year, he realized how the confusing layout could be a barrier to fully engaging with the university. “I found myself being blocked from doing things I would want to do because I couldn’t figure out where they were.”
Huang joined for similar reasons. “Through my freshman year, I’d get lost on campus once in a while,” he recalled. “I thought it would be great to have a map that shows you the most efficient way to get through campus.”
To develop the tool, much of the data came from Carnegie Mellon’s detailed floor plan PDFs, which were parsed to generate indoor floor plans automatically. Using this data, the team created a graph for each building’s indoor layout, with nodes representing locations and edges as routes. Huang, as part of his summer research project, created a CMUMaps data visualization app that could parse these floor plans automatically and extract room information. For outdoor areas, the nodes had to be added manually.
“Once you have the graph, you can get paths of different kinds,” Urban added, “so an important feature that we have to be very sure our data is good enough to do is implementing accessible routes … for people who might be in a wheelchair or otherwise not be able to take the stairs.”
In developing the tool, Urban and Huang leveraged both classroom knowledge and collaborations within ScottyLabs. Urban was drawn to the project for its map-based format and the opportunity to apply classroom knowledge, particularly algorithms like uniform-cost search, in a useful and impactful way. “It’s cool to see something like that actually coming to life in a real application,” he said.
Similarly, Huang saw CMUMaps as a chance to apply skills like user-centered design and database use to improve people’s lives. “Our goal is to use technology to improve processes for people. So it’s great to apply what we learn in classes … to this real-life project that can actually benefit a lot of people,” he shared.
The team worked closely with ScottyLab’s design committee to transform the algorithm into an accessible and user-friendly interface. Under the leadership of Michael Zhou, the former director of ScottyLabs’ Labrador committee, the team paired with designers to refine the app’s user interface and user experience. Over the summer break, Huang implemented these designs into the app, resulting in the features seen today — such as the search bar, detailed information cards, an intuitive navigation interface, and a detailed map of the Carnegie Mellon campus.
The team has ambitious goals that go beyond creating a simple navigation map for moving between. In addition to pinpointing users’ current location — with permission — they hope to incorporate information about Carnegie Mellon events, making it a more personalized alternative to Google Maps.
Looking ahead, the team is excited to launch an app version of CMUMaps on the Apple Store and introduce new features. However, in updating the tool, they face technical challenges, including gathering the data input needed to optimize location tracking and transition the map from 2D to 3D.
“Data is the big problem for CMUMaps. We need to find some way to get some data from the school,” Huang said. “To put a shuttle feature, I had a meeting with the Transportation Office about getting APIs … and if you’re inside the building, we need to know the altitude of which floor you’re on, so it would be really nice if we could collect data on the altitude of every floor.”
The product development is ongoing, and the team is seeking further feedback from the Carnegie Mellon community, as well as more participants to join the team. “Let us know if you have feature requests, and I will try to implement them … or if you want to join ScottysLab,” said Urban.