Practical Indoor Spatial Mapping & Virtual Environments

Indoor spaces are notoriously indifferent to GPS, making mapping an exercise in deliberate observation, proper hardware handling, and methodical data hygiene. This intensive, eight-hour workshop walks through the entire pipeline: capturing spaces with consumer and professional 360 cameras and small aircraft, batch-processing raw imagery, extracting 2D/3D building geometry, capturing discrete 3D objects, and assembling a dynamic, searchable virtual environment.

A Capstone Build is the final, end-to-end practical project where students assemble every technique taught across the two days into a single, functional deliverable. By the end of Day 2, participants will take an unorganised raw dataset and turn it into a complete, navigable virtual museum populated with interactive 3D assets, metadata, and spatial drawings.

(4 Hours)

• The Hardware Roster: Practical trade-offs between dedicated 360 rigs, 1-inch sensor cameras, bracketed HDR rigs, and lightweight DJI aircraft for high-clearance interior spaces.

• Camera Rigging & Stability: Monopod discipline, counterweights, anti-gravity and stabilised walk-through techniques, and eliminating tripod footprint artefacts in the nadir.

• Exposure & Lighting Strategy: Managing interior lighting shifts, blown-out window exposures, and multi-exposure HDR capture workflows in confined spaces.

• Capture Geometry: Planning overlap, nodal spacing, line-of-sight continuity, and spatial pathing to ensure clean alignment downstream.

• Raw Image Pipeline: Ingesting multi-bracket spherical photos and 360 video streams.

• Batch Editing Workflows: Setting up automated correction templates for chromatic aberration, white balance normalisation, and exposure flattening across hundreds of panoramas.

• Stitching & Alignment Quality Control: Correcting parallax errors, yaw/pitch levelling, and stitching seam blending before moving into spatial engines.

15-Minute Break

• From Spheres to Structure: Converting 360 photo paths into spatial point clouds and rough depth maps.

• Point Cloud Cleanup in CloudCompare: Segmenting noise, subsampling massive point sets, leveling coordinate systems, and extracting clean floor/wall slices.

• Linework & Drafting in Rhino: Importing sliced point clouds and ortho-projections to extract accurate 2D floor plans, wall boundaries, and architectural reference drawings.

• Structuring Indoor Spaces: Importing architectural drawings and vectorised linework into Mappedin.
  
• Nodes, Pathing, and Zones: Defining walkable paths, vertical transitions (stairs, elevators), and spatial zones for real-time indoor wayfinding.
  
• Geo-referencing & Scale Calibration: Aligning local floor plans with coordinate systems for consistent real-world scale.

(4 Hours)

• Asset Taxonomy & Metadata: Designing a structured naming and tagging schema for indoor assets (exhibits, mechanical gear, room fixtures).

• Searchability & Wayfinding Links: Attaching searchable metadata, condition reports, and external database links directly to indoor map coordinates.

• Layer Control: Managing multi-tier views (public visitor interface vs. facility management/operations layers).

• Introduction to 3D Object Photogrammetry: Field capture rules for individual artefacts, turntable basics, cross-polarisation concepts, and coverage geometry (bridging into the Advanced Photogrammetry Masterclass).

• Large Asset Handling in Nira: Uploading high-density 3D photogrammetry meshes and CAD models without crippling browser performance.

• Spatial Anchors & Annotations: Embedding photorealistic 3D scans within virtual walk-through nodes, complete with dimensional measurements and visual callouts.
  

15-Minute Break

Participants receive a raw dataset of a multi-gallery museum space and execute the full build from zero to deployment:

• Batch Clean & Stitch: Process the raw 360 capture nodes.

• Floor Plan Alignment: Import and calibrate gallery linework in Mappedin.
  
• Artefact Integration: Ingest and anchor 3D artefact models into the virtual galleries via Nira and spatial viewer tools.
  
• Interactive Layering: Link museum catalogue data, audio/text blurbs, and wayfinding routes between exhibits.
  
• Publish & Test: Conduct a walkthrough to verify scale, line-of-sight transitions, and search query responsiveness.

• Common field failures (reflective glass, featureless corridors, lighting blowouts) and how to recover in post.

• Export pipelines for AEC, digital twins, and public-facing interactive web embeds.

• Next steps: Deep dive into micro-accuracy, sub-millimetre metrology, and multispectral analysis in the Advanced Photogrammetry course.

Hardware Covered: 360 Panoramic Cameras (Insta360 / Ricoh / 1-Inch sensors), Tripods/Monopods/ masts, DJI Mini/Air series for high-ceiling interiors

Drafting & Geometry: Rhino 3D, CloudCompare.

Indoor Mapping & Cloud 3D: Mappedin, Nira.

Image & Stitching Utilities: Capture one/ Adobe Lightroom / Photoshop (or RawTherapee / Darktable), PTGui / OEM Stitchers.

Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with 2D/3D file formats (.obj, .las/.e57, .dwg/.dxf, .jpg/.exr). No coding required.

• Complete end-to-end SOP checklist for indoor reality capture.

• Pre-configured batch image-processing presets.

• CloudCompare point-cloud slicing templates.

• A live, fully interactive Virtual Museum project ready for portfolio demonstration.