![]() ![]() ![]() (You could also implement location-specific audio with much older technology-for example, Victrolas-but the ability to control the audio from a central server could lead to interesting possibilities.) I thought that the idea of location-specific audio might be interesting. I then configured my beacon to broadcast that MP3's URL, but none of the metadata showed up on my phone's display. One experiment I tried was the use of Audio Tag Tool to add every metadata field available to an MP3. Still, the idea of such inexpensive hardware using URIs to identify things brings a nice semantic web touch to an Internet of Things architecture. (This could vary by beacon product.) The article mentioned above describes the role of URL shorteners in the architecture. They also displayed the hastily-drawn favicon image I created for the web page.Ī beacon won't broadcast just any URI that you want, because the allowable length is somewhat limited. Touching the notification sent the phone to the referenced web page.īoth notifications above show what the app pulled from my sample web page: the content of the head element's title element and the value of the content attribute from the meta element that had a name attribute value of "description". I don't want to have to bring such an app to the foreground every time I want to check for nearby beacons, so I was glad to see that the app also added something to my phone's notifications list: This all worked the same, with the same app, on my wife's iPhone. Tapping the blue title took the phone to the web page. I learned a lot from it about which components of my web page would be picked up by an app that received the broadcast URL.Īfter I configured the beacon, the open source physical web app found it and displayed the following on my Samsung S6: While waiting for my RadBeacon to arrive in the mail, after Dan Brickley tweeted the mobiForge article Eddystone beacon technology and the Physical Web, I had set mine to the URL of a sample web page that I created for this purpose. Its documentation shows the kinds of properties it lets you set, such as the URL to broadcast and the Transmit Power (which affects the battery life and the distance that the URL is broadcast-in a museum, you want people receiving the URL of the painting in front of them, not the one twenty feet to the left of it). ![]() The Android RadBeacon app generally worked, although I often had to press "Apply" several times and restart Bluetooth before new settings would actually take hold. You configure it with a phone app built for that particular beacon product line. ![]() I haven't dug into the pros and cons of these different formats yet I just wanted something that was likely to work out of the box with both my Samsung S6 Android phone and my wife's iPhone. I also chose this one because it supports Google's Eddystone open beacon format, Apple's iBeacon format, and Radius Network's AltBeacon. At the right you can see mine plugged into a conference swag phone recharger. Most need batteries, typically the kind you put in a watch, so to avoid this I got a RadBeacon USB from Radius Technologies that draws its power from any USB port where you plug it in. You can find these beacons for as little as $14, and even cheaper on eBay, where colorful bracelet versions can cost less then $10. When the appropriate app on your phone (or perhaps your phone's operating system) saw this, it would alert you to the availability of this localized information. Advocates often cite the use case of how a beacon device located near a work of art in a museum might broadcast a URL pointing to a web page about it-for example, one near Robert Rauschenberg's Bed in New York's Museum of Modern Art could broadcast the URL, their web site's page with information about the work. BLE, which I assume is pronounced "bleh"). I've been hearing about proximity beacons lately and thought it would be fun to try one of these inexpensive devices that broadcast a URL for a range of just a few meters via Bluetooth Low Energy (a.k.a. ![]()
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