We built a few D3 visualizations of where users were at the party, and how fast they found hidden iBeacons... kind of like a treasure hunt game to demo the technology.
If you've implemented the location callbacks for a specific region (defined by a UUID), then you'll receive messages with that detail how far you are from the device (within about 70m, depending on your device). Depending on the device, the power settings, etc, this can be very accurate.. to < 1m. The IOS api's also support background processing so the app doesn't necessarily need to be in the foreground to process. You will get called back when you enter and exit regions.
I'm excited to see where this goes. I was recently on a team for the Salesforce Hackathon that created a pretty cool rewards and consumer statistics platform. Earn points for visiting, get a push notification when you receive a reward, etc. Awesome for the consumer. The business owner gets statistics based on foot traffic, peak hours, most visited beacons, etc.
We didn't have any iBeacons handy (only 5 days between idea and completion), so we were using an iPad to broadcast an "iBeacon". It was pretty neat. I'd like to get my hands on some of Estimotes beacons.
I was reading about how iBeacon will revolutionize contact less payments but when I read about square wallet, I thought this is already done without any need of iBeacon.
Congratulations to the Estimote guys! I've borrowed one of these to test out their signal strength/consistency.
(At a recent AngelHack, I built an indoor-positioning system based on triangulation of signal strength. I tested with a StickNFind BLE device and a couple of homemade BLE(-ish) devices based on nRF24L01 RF modules. I'm hoping the signal strength from the Estimote is going to be more consistent than these.)
I got some estimotes and my experience is that the signal strength doesn't change consistently based on the distance. I was planning to do a program using trilateration... but I don't think it would work.
My experience was that the RSSI does change reasonably consistently, but that there's quite a lot of noise (so you need to smooth it appropriately). I also get the impression that it's affected by orientation of the phone relative to the beacon, and also by anything blocking line-of-sight (including humans). Mounting the beacons high up could reduce the effect of this last point.
Let me know how accurate you can get your system. I was planning something similar but with the broad ranges offered by BluetoothLE/iBeacon I didn't expect to get much accuracy out of the system.
My trilateration code isn't great - I tried doing it properly and couldn't get it working in the 24 hours of the hackathon. Positioning along a 1D line using signal strength from two beacons was much simpler and I implemented this and then bodged in a third beacon using some averaging.
Congrats Estimote - We recently got the developer pack and implemented an Android SDK for the same, and the motes are handy. The calibration is a bit off for each mote, and thus location accuracy is a bit compromised. Hope the production version will be better calibrated.
We also have a similar SDK that works over indoor WiFi, though the accuracy is definitely better for the BLE beacon.
Thanks! You may try increasing the broadcasting power of each beacon to get better accuracy. Also, we're working on our Android SDK so please stay tuned.
The potential applications are fascinating, but I'm getting a new picture of the thought behind Apple's addition of Control Center in iOS 7: The Bluetooth toggle isn't just there for a modicum of battery conservation. Sometimes you'll welcome iBeacons; other times you'll want to keep them at arm's length.
Yeah, super curious as to what Apple is cooking in that department, I'm sure they are thinking about it a lot. For now their policy is just to OPT-IN by downloading relevant app and giving it permissions, you will not get spammed by beacons for which you didn't download relevant app.
The recent iBeacon update to the Apple Store iOS app may hint at how Apple wants apps to behave. Basically, it's strictly opt-in, with copious information about the benefits, and obviously, possibility to turn the in-store notification off. I suppose in the future, as the customers get acquainted with the technology, there won't be the need to spell out the benefits, but the opt-in and strict user control are here to stay.
http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2013/10/09/how-to-make-a...
Here's a link the source for an app that we wrote for a Party that we threw recently..
https://github.com/backofthecup/HolidayParty
We built a few D3 visualizations of where users were at the party, and how fast they found hidden iBeacons... kind of like a treasure hunt game to demo the technology.