Digital wayfinding that actually helps people find things.

Digital wayfinding: directories, room-side touchscreens, and outdoor pylons

A static printed directory is out of date the day it ships. The tenant in suite 4 moves out, the tenant in suite 2 expands into 3, the doctor's on-call rotation changes — and the printed directory in the lobby is wrong, with a sticker over the wrong name and the property manager fielding calls about how to find a tenant nobody can locate.

Digital wayfinding is the answer when the directory needs to be live. Edit the tenant once in the dashboard. Every screen — entry directory, elevator bank, floor landing, conference status, plaza pylon — updates from the same record in seconds. There's one source of truth and it's correct.

Where the screens go: seven placements per mixed-use lobby

• Entry directory — 55″ portrait, alphabetical tenant list with floor numbers and a multi-language toggle. The first thing a visitor sees.
• Reception side — 43″ landscape next to the front desk for property news, building announcements, and welcome cards.
• Elevator bank — 49″ landscape with a floor-by-floor map. Catches the visitor in the 30 seconds they're waiting for the elevator.
• Floor landing — 43″ portrait per floor showing that floor's tenants, conference rooms, and amenities.
• Room-side touchscreen — 21.5″ touch panel at conference and exam-room doors with occupancy and one-tap booking.
• Conference status — 32″ landscape on each conference room's exterior wall, integrated with the room-booking system.
• Plaza pylon — 55″ outdoor IP56-sealed at 4,000 nits in an IP-rated enclosure for outdoor entrance and drop-off wayfinding.

What we ship for each industry

Hotels and resorts run multi-floor wayfinding for conference and banquet floors, amenity floors, and guest-room corridors with day-of event boards integrated with the property's PMS. Hospital campuses run department directories, elevator-bank boards, exam-room signage, and emergency wayfinding pulled from the EMR or room-scheduling system. Universities run multi-building wayfinding with departmental, dining, residence, and athletic facility directionals; departments edit their own content while campus comms keeps emergency overrides. Corporate buildings run lobby directories, floor landings, and conference-status touchpoints integrated with Microsoft Graph or Google Calendar. Malls and large-format retail run interactive wayfinding kiosks with searchable store directories and ad-loadable promotional overlays.

Real-time updates and emergency overrides

The dashboard is the directory. Edit a tenant, every screen updates. Multi-tenant properties get scoped permissions — property management edits the master directory, individual tenants edit their own promotional slots, security keeps emergency-override rights. Override pushes evacuation routes per floor in seconds: the screen on floor 7 shows the floor-7 plan, the screen on floor 2 shows floor-2's. Critical safety infrastructure that we test quarterly with our managed-service customers during scheduled drills.

Pricing a wayfinding program

Hardware: indoor commercial-grade 43″ ≈ $700, 55″ ≈ $1,200, 75″ ≈ $2,400. 21.5″ touchscreens for room-side run roughly $900. outdoor IP56-sealed outdoor pylons price ≈ 1.6–2× QM equivalent, plus the IP-rated enclosure and pole-mount. Software is flat per screen per month with full multi-tenant permission scoping included. Multi-building campus rollouts price wave-by-wave per region. Standard turnkey ships under a week per location; campus rollouts run a wave per building. Full pricing is on the pricing page and quotes return inside four business hours.

Read more on campus wayfinding signage, digital signage for universities, and hospital digital signage.

API integrations: room booking, EMR, building management

The wayfinding screen is only as useful as the data behind it. CrownTV integrates with Microsoft Graph, Google Workspace, Robin, and Teem for room-booking — the conference-room status screen reads occupancy and the next meeting in real time. We integrate with property-management systems for tenant directory updates so leasing teams edit one record and every screen updates. Hospital wayfinding integrates with Epic and Cerner via HL7 or FHIR feeds where the customer's IT can authorize it; the directory shows on-call rotations, exam-room availability, and specialist locations from the EMR.

For building-management integration — HVAC status, parking-garage availability, elevator service status — the dashboard polls the BMS API and renders the result into a utility strip on the wayfinding screen. Visitors see "Garage 1 full, Garage 2 has spaces" before they pull in. Tenants see HVAC service notices in real time. The wayfinding screen carries operational utility on top of its directory function.

Multilingual cycling and accessibility

Wayfinding programs in international markets need multilingual content. We schedule per-language layouts on a cycle — English, Spanish, Mandarin, French — with each language displayed for a defined duration before swapping. For touchscreen wayfinding, the customer taps a flag and the directory renders in their language. Touchscreens fall under ADA reach-range requirements; we mount at 48″ centerline maximum and ship audio output for visually-impaired users on customer request.

Every CrownTV wayfinding install ships with high-contrast text, sans-serif typography rated for legibility at distance, and font sizes scaled to viewing distance. The 55″ entry directory is readable from across the lobby; the 21.5″ room-side touchscreen is readable from arm's length. We don't ship one design at all sizes — every panel gets content scaled to its viewing context.

Customer programs we run

Hospitality groups run multi-floor wayfinding for conference, banquet, and amenity floors with localization for international clientele. Healthcare campuses run department directories, elevator-bank boards, and emergency-override workflows tested quarterly. Universities run multi-building campus wayfinding with departmental, dining, residence, and athletic facility directionals. Corporate buildings run lobby directories, floor landings, and conference-status touchpoints integrated with Microsoft Graph. Mall and big-box retail run interactive store directories with searchable inventory and ad-loadable promotional overlays. Funeral homes and service venues run room and service directories that update from the venue's scheduling system without anyone touching the screen.

What the install actually looks like on day one

A typical multi-tenant lobby wayfinding install: Monday morning, two technicians arrive on site with the panels and mounts. Substrate verification on every screen location takes 30 minutes. Mount installation takes two hours per floor. Network drops are pre-pulled by the customer's IT before we arrive. Cable runs and panel mounting take the remainder of the morning. Afternoon: content commissioning — directory templates loaded with the customer's tenant list, room-booking system integrated and tested, emergency-override workflow configured and verified. By end of day Tuesday on a typical 7-screen mixed-use lobby, the program is live and the property manager has been trained on the dashboard. Multi-building campus rollouts run a wave per building on the same template.