How Lumicrowd maps any venue to its own layout with normalized coordinates and zones, so every effect uses the real space you have - from a flat club floor to a tiered arena or a dome.

A festival floor, a tiered arena, a dome, a sports hall - no two venues light up the same way. Lumicrowd maps each one to its own layout, so every effect uses the space you actually have. Here is how a room becomes a pixel grid.

Normalized coordinates

Every seat gets a position in normalized space, from 0.0 to 1.0:

x - horizontal (0.0 = left, 1.0 = right)
y - depth or height (0.0 = front/top, 1.0 = back/bottom)

Because positions are relative, the same effect works whether the room holds a few hundred people or many thousands. A wave that sweeps left to right is just "x from 0 to 1" - the layout decides what that means in the real space.

Zones: the audience in sections

Seats are grouped into zones - the natural sections of a venue. A zone has:

a short code and a readable name (for example "Public" or "Industry")
bounds in normalized space
rows, each with a seat count

Zones are what let the operator light "the left stand" or "the back half" as one gesture - and they are robust at scale, because every phone always knows which zone it belongs to.

Venue types

Layouts come in a few shapes:

Rectangular - standard blocks of seating
Oval / bowl - seats follow the arc of an arena
Custom - fully hand-placed coordinates for an irregular room

At Citymesh we mapped the round Wintercircus arena into seven branded pie-slice zones: a custom, circular layout. See it in the case study.

Effects in normalized space

Because the grid is abstract, effects are simple to express and reuse:

Solid - one colour everywhere
Wave - a sweep across an axis
Gradient - a smooth transition across the room
Pulse - brightness over time
Sparkle - a per-phone twinkle (random, so it reads well even in a huge, imperfect crowd)

The compositor resolves each effect to real seats, zone by zone, so what the designer imagines in the abstract lands correctly in the physical room.

Why "zone per zone" beats a per-pixel sweep at scale

In a big venue, a perfectly smooth per-pixel sweep is fragile - it assumes every phone is exactly where you think and perfectly in sync. Driving effects zone by zone is far more robust: each phone only needs to know its zone, and the result still reads as one coordinated image. The one effect we do run per phone is the sparkle - precisely because it is random, so small position errors do not matter.

The takeaway

Mapping is the quiet half of the product. Get the layout right - normalized, zoned, matched to the real room - and every effect you build just works, from a club to a stadium.