[nonis]

Yeah, BLE beacons aren't particularly accurate for an IPS. I worked on this problem a few years ago at FB, for the purposes of helping employees find themselves + meeting rooms on a mobile app. We really only needed 2-3 meter accuracy, so people could figure out approximately where they are. BLE signals are crazy noisy, so you need to tack on a lot of filtering (kalman filter, etc) and it really helps if you have multiple data sources (wifi signals, gyroscope, RF, etc). We could also kinda cheat by adding a track to the center of each hallway on the map, then magnet users towards the track.

[ghaff]

There was a lot of interest in BLE beacons a couple of years back for retail displays and the like. But as you say beacons don’t really work all that well, people had to install apps, etc. and the whole space seems to have sort of fizzled. The wireless beacons also don’t really have good enough battery life for a lot of applications. I played around with some of this stuff but it wasn’t good enough for anything practical that I was interested in.

I wish there was a way to do better phone tracking but it’s hard to come up with a system that would be fast and reliable if you left your phone down somewhere while not driving you crazy with false alarms on a day to day basis.

[qrv3w]

That sounds very similar to this! Did FB ever open-source it?

[nonis]

Unfortunately no. Last I worked on it it was pretty heavily integrated with their mobile maps application (https://code.facebook.com/posts/504406169737284/instrumentin...) and there wasn't any plan on open sourcing.