Formal events have a predictable bottleneck: 240 guests arrive within the same half hour, and every one of them needs to find one specific chair. The traditional answer is a printed seating chart with a crowd around it. We were asked to do better for a gala at the State Library of Victoria.
The venue map became an SVG - every table, aisle, and seat a real vector element with coordinates. That single decision unlocked everything else: precise positioning, crisp rendering at any zoom level on any phone, and the ability to treat the floor as a graph you can compute routes over.
Guests scanned a QR code on posters placed through the venue. Each poster's code encoded its own location, so the site knew where you were standing before you typed anything. Enter your name, and the map draws an animated path - a line tracing from that poster, around the tables, to your exact seat, using SVG stroke animation. Watching your own route draw itself is the moment the tool sells itself.
Precision was the hard requirement. 'Table 14' isn't good enough in a room of MPs, senators, and business leaders; the path ends at your chair, on the correct side of the table. That meant mapping seats individually rather than tables - tedious once, effortless forever.
The whole thing ran as a lightweight web app: no download, no login, nothing to explain. The best event tech is the kind guests never think about - they just sit down.