CES Official App
The Problem
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is the world's largest tech trade show, attracting 170,000+ attendees across multiple massive venue halls. The official app needed to serve as the indispensable companion for navigating the event — from finding specific exhibitor booths across 2.9 million square feet of floor space to managing personalized schedules with hundreds of concurrent sessions.
The existing app suffered from poor indoor navigation, a search experience that couldn't handle 4,400+ exhibitors effectively, and a schedule builder that didn't account for travel time between venues. With attendees relying on the app in a venue with spotty Wi-Fi from network congestion, offline reliability was essential but barely functional.
Approach
I built a custom interactive floor map system using MapKit with custom tile overlays for indoor venue layouts. Each exhibitor booth was a tappable region with rich detail cards showing company info, product categories, and booth staff. The map supported multi-floor navigation with smooth transitions between hall levels and provided walking directions between any two points on the show floor.
The session scheduling engine was designed to be intelligent — when a user added a session, the app automatically flagged time conflicts, calculated walking time between venues using the floor map data, and suggested buffer periods. All schedule and exhibitor data was pre-loaded during app launch and stored in Core Data, making the entire experience available offline.
Challenges
Indoor positioning at the scale of the Las Vegas Convention Center was extremely challenging. GPS was unreliable indoors, and Bluetooth beacon coverage was inconsistent across halls. I implemented a hybrid approach combining Wi-Fi fingerprinting, beacon triangulation, and dead reckoning from the accelerometer to provide approximate user location with a 10-meter accuracy — good enough for hall-level navigation.
The data model was complex and dynamic. Exhibitors changed booth locations, sessions were rescheduled, and new events were added daily during the show week. I designed a differential sync system that checked for updates every 15 minutes over the network but only downloaded changed records, keeping bandwidth usage minimal in the congested venue Wi-Fi environment.
Results
The app was used by over 120,000 unique attendees during CES week, with an average of 8 sessions per day per user. The interactive floor map became the most-used feature, with 2.3 million map interactions over the 4-day event. Indoor navigation accuracy of 10 meters proved sufficient for attendees to locate specific booths.
The offline-first architecture proved critical — during peak hours when venue Wi-Fi was effectively unusable, the app continued to function seamlessly. The smart scheduling feature reduced reported session conflicts by 60% compared to the previous year, and attendees rated the app 4.4 stars on the App Store.
Interested in working together?
I'm available for senior and lead roles, freelance projects, and technical consulting.
Get in touch