Case Details
Project in brief: At WAIC 2024, SightPlus launched a venue-wide AR navigation mini-program that helped attendees move between the World Expo Center and Expo Hall, find booths and facilities, share locations, reserve exhibits, and discover interactive experiences. Built on EasyAR Mega, the service delivered high-precision positioning through WeChat without requiring a separate app download.
Use case: Large-scale exhibition and event navigation Access: WeChat mini-program via QR code Core experiences: Indoor-outdoor AR routes, booth search, location sharing, people-finding, AI digital-human guidance, exhibit reservations, and AR check-ins Deployment: Private or hybrid cloud for dynamic exhibition spaces
Project Context: Solving the Maze of a Large Exhibition Venue
Large exhibitions combine extensive floor areas, multiple buildings, temporary structures, crowded corridors, and weak indoor GPS signals. Visitors must translate flat floor plans into real turns, floors, entrances, and exits while trying to find booths, facilities, scheduled activities, and one another.
SightPlus brought its spatial-computing experience to WAIC 2024 and packaged venue-scale navigation as a WeChat mini-program. The result was a lightweight flow for a complex public space: scan a QR code, search for a destination, and follow the route directly in the camera view.
Visitor Journey: Find, Meet, Book, and Explore
The mini-program places navigation and event participation on the same service surface. Visitors do not need to switch between a floor map, messaging app, reservation system, and activity page as they move through the venue.
Search for booths, exhibition areas, dining locations, restrooms, and service points across buildings and floors.
Share a booth or current location and generate a code that guides a friend or colleague directly to that point.
Reserve metaverse exhibits and connect the reservation with the route needed to reach them.
Receive recommendations from an AI digital human and take part in AR virtual photo-op check-ins.
Cross-Building Live AR Navigation
The system bridges indoor and outdoor spaces between the World Expo Center and Expo Hall, including areas affected by temporary exhibition structures. Visitors point the phone camera at their surroundings and see virtual paths overlaid on the real view, reducing uncertainty about direction, floor, and building transitions.
Location Sharing and People-Finding
A visitor can share a booth or current location with one tap. Another person scans the generated code and receives AR navigation directly to the shared point. Exhibitors can use the same mechanism to make their stands easier to reach, turning location sharing into a practical acquisition channel inside the venue.
AI Digital Human and Event Services
The AI digital-human assistant recommends activities and services based on visitor interests. Exhibit reservations and AR check-ins form a connected sequence: discover an experience, reserve it, navigate to it, and participate when you arrive.
Implementation: EasyAR Mega Spatial Computing
The WAIC navigation experience runs on SightPlus's EasyAR Mega, an edge-cloud spatial-computing platform designed for cities, parks, exhibition venues, shopping districts, and other large spaces. VPS compares live camera imagery with pre-built 3D point-cloud maps and calculates the user's six-degree-of-freedom pose, enabling persistent positioning indoors and outdoors without relying on satellite signals.
Dynamic event environments introduce additional challenges: temporary structures can change sight lines, crowds can obscure visual features, and lighting and moving objects can affect recognition. EasyAR Mega's device-cloud architecture supports localized data updates, long-term stability, and incremental expansion as the exhibition layout changes.
Supports multi-device data collection, reconstruction across millions of square meters, and incremental updates for temporary structures.
Maintains navigation in crowded conditions, variable lighting, and scenes containing moving objects.
Delivers AR capabilities to mini-programs, mobile apps, and AR/MR glasses, with support for Unity and Unreal Engine.
Supports private and hybrid cloud configurations suited to event organizers and changing exhibition environments.
Project Value: One Spatial Service Layer for the Event
For attendees: Live AR routes replace the uncertainty of paper maps and flat floor plans. Visitors can spend less time searching for booths, facilities, and contacts and more time engaging with the event.
For exhibitors: A booth can be shared as a direct navigation destination, helping invited visitors and new prospects reach the stand through a simple code.
For organizers: Navigation, reservations, visitor-flow guidance, recommendations, and engagement features live within one digital layer, improving service consistency and creating a clearer view of how people use the venue.
For future deployments: The lightweight mini-program and spatial-map architecture can be adapted to exhibitions, scenic areas, airports, hospitals, shopping malls, and other complex public spaces.
Outlook: From Route Guidance to Spatial Services
Mobile mini-programs allow spatial computing to reach visitors who do not carry dedicated XR hardware. AR navigation provides a practical entry point because it solves an immediate problem while establishing the spatial foundation for richer event services.
Future deployments can combine route guidance with AI commentary, AR content, check-ins, reservations, and commercial or public-service discovery, allowing the physical venue and its digital information to operate as one coordinated spatial layer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did visitors need to download an app?
No. The navigation was delivered through a WeChat mini-program that visitors could open by scanning a QR code.
What could visitors find with the AR navigation?
Visitors could search for booths, exhibition areas, restrooms, service points, dining areas, and other destinations across buildings and floors.
How did location sharing work?
A visitor shared a booth or current location by generating a code. Another person scanned the code and received AR navigation directly to that point.
What technology powered the system?
The system used SightPlus's EasyAR Mega spatial-computing platform, including VPS, 3D point-cloud mapping, high-precision positioning, motion tracking, and device-cloud collaboration.
Can the solution be reused beyond AI conferences?
Yes. Its mini-program and spatial-map architecture can be adapted to exhibitions, scenic areas, airports, hospitals, shopping malls, and other large or complex venues.
Planning AR navigation for a large venue or public space?
Explore EasyAR MegaImage source: existing public materials from the SightPlus WAIC 2024 AR navigation project. Updated September 2026.
