Surely this must have been discussed before, and please redirect me to any such public discussion if so, but the closest I could find was this feature request:
Areas: add an “Adjacent areas” list attribute
My suggestion is having areas laid out spatially in a logical floor plan.
In the most basic form it could represent each area as an approximate rectangle with 2D coordinates for corners and connection points where different areas interconnect. (i.e. doorways.) From there it could take any number of more advanced forms all the way up to full 3D BIM models, but wouldn’t have to to be of value.
Many devices are inherently spatial in nature and could be given position attributes (spatial coordinates) in the coordinate system of the house.
The use case of lighting up adjacent areas could be further improved to light up lights within a certain radius. Areas could be large, such as a living room, or small, such as a hallway, and area adjacency may not be the best indicator of proximity. Actual spatial coordinates in combination with doorway information improves on that.
Many people create floor plan dashboards that allow them to get a nice visual overview. That is currently non spatial information presented spatially. With actual spatial information a simple floor plan dashboard could be auto generated.
Presence sensors such as the “Bermuda” BLE tracker could provide better tracking information by looking at RSSI from multiple ESPHome devices and trilaterate presence to areas in between areas with sensors. A more advanced implementation could potentially take wall attenuation into account where different walls may behave differently.
Visualization of things like WiFi signal strength or room temperatures are inherently spatial, and temperatures could be interpolated in between sensor locations.
The topology of mesh networks like Zigbee or Thread could be visualized spatially which could help to pinpoint weak spots.
Some devices like robotic vacuums generate their own maps, and while these may not be in open, well documented formats, there is at least potential for having maps from a vacuum form the basis for a HA floor plan and to visualize vacuum information in the HA floor plan.
Robotic lawn mowers that rely on GPS/GNSS should be much easier to visualize.
I am sure there are many more uses, but this is just what came to mind as I am typing this. In my mind this addition wouldn’t have to be all that intrusive: Areas could get something like
floorplan_top_left: [x ,y]
floorplan_bottom_right: [x ,y]
floorplan_doorways:
- [ x1, y1 ]
- [ x2, y2 ]
or even floorplan_polygon: [[x0, y0], [x1, y1], [x2, y2], [x3, y3] ,[x4, y4], [x5, y5]]
and devices get something like: location_xyz: [x ,y, z]
z-coordinates could be explicit or left out and inferred by the floor level.
These are just discussion points but I hope they could provide some inspiration.