From the plaza to the lobby,
one continuous location.
For Msheireb Properties, and with Orange, Pole Star brought NAO® Mobile to Msheireb Downtown Doha - permanent indoor and outdoor location across the district, delivered inside the citizen Msheireb app.
A whole downtown to navigate - where GPS quietly gives up
Msheireb Downtown Doha is one of the world's first sustainable, smart-city downtown regenerations - a dense, mixed-use district of retail, residences, offices and hotels, developed by Msheireb Properties and digitally orchestrated with Orange.
At that scale, guidance can't stop at the front door. Visitors and residents move constantly between outdoor streets and plazas and the insides of many buildings - and standard satellite positioning fades the moment they step indoors, breaking the experience exactly where people need it most.
The challenge: keep location continuous across the district - outdoors and indoors, building to building - inside a single app people already use.
Four location services, woven into the city's own app
Pole Star delivered NAO® Mobile for smart cities, embedded in the Msheireb app - so the district's location intelligence reaches people through the app they already carry.
Permanent localization, indoors & out
Continuous positioning with a seamless indoor / outdoor transition as people move around the city - no gap when they step inside.
Wayfinding across multiple buildings
Turn-by-turn indoor / outdoor wayfinding that routes people across the district and through several buildings as one continuous journey.
Intelligent parking recall
The app memorizes where a vehicle was parked, then guides the driver straight back to it - across large, multi-level parking.
Location analytics
Aggregate analytics on visitors and residents - movement and footfall insight that helps the operator understand how the district is used.
The hard part: not breaking at the door
What makes a smart-city deployment work isn't indoor positioning or outdoor positioning - it's the hand-off between them, done so smoothly the user never notices it happen.
Indoor / outdoor continuity is the ability to keep a single, unbroken position on a moving user as they pass between satellite-covered outdoor spaces and GPS-denied indoor ones - within one app, one map and one experience.
Outdoors
Satellite positioning guides the user across streets and plazas.
Transition
At the threshold, NAO® takes over - the hand-off stays invisible.
Indoors
NAO® Mobile keeps the position live through buildings and levels.
Light on the phone, kept on the ground
The deployment pairs the NAO® Mobile SDK - embedded in the Msheireb app - with an on-premise NAO® server, so the district's location services run on infrastructure the operator controls.
NAO® Mobile SDK
Embedded in the Msheireb app - indoor and outdoor position, on the user's own phone.
On-premise NAO® server
The location engine runs on infrastructure the operator controls.
Analytics from the same platform
Visitor and resident movement insight, drawn from the same location layer.
Because the server sits on-premise, the district's location data stays on the operator's own infrastructure - not in a third-party cloud.
And because location lives inside the existing Msheireb app, residents and visitors get city-scale guidance with nothing extra to install.
Value on both sides of the app
One location layer serves the people moving through the district and the operator running it - each getting something different from the same platform.
Visitors
- Guided from the street into any building without the app losing them
- Turn-by-turn wayfinding across the whole district
- Never lose the car - parking recall leads them straight back
Residents
- The same seamless guidance, every day, everywhere on site
- One familiar app for the whole neighborhood
- Effortless movement between home, shops and services
The operator
- Location analytics on visitors and residents
- Insight into how the district is actually used
- Data kept on-premise, under the operator's control
The result is a smart city that feels effortless to move through - and legible to the people who run it.
Delivered in partnership
Client / developer
Partner
Location platform
City-scale location,
inside the app people already use.
If your development spans multiple buildings and open spaces, the same NAO® Mobile approach - seamless indoor / outdoor guidance, parking recall and analytics - can be embedded in your own app, on infrastructure you control.
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