Day 1, 09:40 — all twelve layers on
Existing roads, planned roads, water, green space, plot numbers, floor-area ratio heat map, metro alignment, utility tunnels, public facilities, demolition areas, sunlight analysis, and a 3D model of the centre.With everything visible it looked like a paint spill. Saturated red over blue over green. The client laughed and said someone had dropped a palette on the map. Nobody wanted to cut a layer; every department had fought for its own.
Day 1, 15:00 — hierarchy instead of deletion
Base map to sixty percent grey. Roads in dark grey rather than black. Water desaturated by half. Heat map at forty-five percent opacity.By five o'clock the map read as a map, with all twelve layers still present. The fix cost nothing and involved no new hardware.
Day 2, 11:00 — the amber-orange argument
Two engineers disagreed about a plot colour while standing at different angles to the table.This is why we calibrate each unit to 6,500 K and hold delta E inside three across the batch. Not for the datasheet, so a planning team argues about the map instead of the display.
We measured the panel on the spot and showed them the number. The argument ended in about a minute.
Day 2, 16:30 — touch that landed 5 mm off
Eight-millimetre tempered glass puts the touch plane above the image. Near the edges, a tap lands a few millimetres from where the finger appears to touch.At 1:2000, five millimetres is about ten metres on the ground, which matters when someone is selecting a building. Edge-weighted offset calibration held the error under three millimetres.
Twenty-point infrared was more than enough. The interaction is drag, pinch and tap. Nobody used more than two fingers.
Day 3 — the ghost image nobody saw until later
Nine hours a day with a fixed information bar at the bottom. After a month, a faint rectangle appeared on a white slide.Static content on LCD leaves an impression. The fix is not a special panel: a semi-transparent bar, a two-pixel shift every twenty minutes, and a screensaver loop during quiet periods.
We also added a thermostatically controlled fan. A sealed 86-inch cabinet reaches forty-five degrees inside on a summer afternoon, and the first thing it loses is brightness.
What the client uses it for now
A layer-preset panel on the side of the table, two taps between a visitor view and a technical view.That is the feature they show other departments when they want more budget, and it was the cheapest thing in the project.