Client & Consumer Software · Education
Wilfrid Laurier University
Campus occupancy map
With more than 21,000 undergraduate students across Laurier, demand for places to study could not be answered by adding space alone. A live campus map turned 20,000+ scheduled classes into useful availability information for tens of thousands of users.
The situation
Laurier serves more than 21,000 undergraduate students across its campuses, while its Waterloo campus alone supports more than 18,800 undergraduate and graduate students within one large city block. As the student population and demand for on-campus study grew, adding enough new physical space would have required significant capital, construction time, and long-term operating cost.
Existing capacity was not always visible to the people who needed it. A classroom could be scheduled for part of the day and sit open afterward while students searched hallways, libraries, and common areas for somewhere to work. Unless someone was already at the door, there was no reliable way to know which rooms were free or how availability was changing elsewhere on campus.
The mandate
Turn changing room availability into a live campus map that helps students and faculty find usable space, including classrooms sitting open between scheduled activities.
Operating constraints
- The university needed to improve capacity without relying on a costly physical expansion.
- Occupancy information needed to stay current during peak academic periods.
- Classrooms had to be treated as available only when they were not required for scheduled use.
- The public experience had to be reliable enough to guide a trip across campus.
- The product needed to be immediately understandable in daily student use.
What 0.5 Labs did
0.5 Labs built a live occupancy map that brings classrooms and study areas into one clear, student-facing view. It shows availability as campus use changes, allowing students and faculty to compare spaces across buildings and decide where to go before walking there.
The product translated scheduling information from more than 20,000 classes into a continuously updated view of room availability. Classrooms open between scheduled activities became part of the usable study-space network without exposing students to timetables or raw operational data. The interaction stayed simple: open the map, compare nearby options, and choose a space. Behind it, the system kept a large and changing set of room-use information current during the busiest parts of the academic day.
What changed
Students and faculty could check availability before moving between buildings. The map converted more than 20,000 scheduled classes into timely room information and helped tens of thousands of users find spaces they might otherwise have missed. Laurier could make better use of existing classrooms while giving its community a faster way to find somewhere to work.
Relevant practices
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