If you haven’t talk to me IRL for the past 10 months, then I haven’t pestered you about the wonders of BLE and micro-location. My love affair with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons became clear when I heard at WWDC 2013 that Apple was implementing BLE beacon detection in their CoreLocation framework. Apple showed how a small BLE beacon sending a constant signal (UUID + Major + Minor *) at a given interval could help for what is now known as micro-location.
At the time I just happened to be experimenting with wifi and bluetooth RSSI to accomplish similar results. I was prototyping a device that sniffed MAC addresses from surrounding devices and trigger certain interactions based on our enterprise software (CRM, HCM, etc). You can find more on this topic in the white paper “How the Internet of Things Will Change the User Experience Status Quo” (sorry but its not free) that I presented last year at the FiCloud conference.
The BLE beacon or iBeacon proved to be a better solution after all, given its user opt-in nature and low power consumption capabilities. Since then I have been prototyping different mobile apps using this technology. The latest of these is a Google Glass + iBeacon ( github link: GlassBeacon) example. I’m claiming to be the first to do this implementation since the ability to integrate BLE on Glass just became available on April 15 2014 :).
Stay tuned for more BLE beacon goodness. We will be showing more enterprise related use cases with this technology in the future.
*UUID: a unique id to distinguish your beacons. Major: used to group related sets of beacons. Minor: used to identify a beacon within a group
Great POC Noel! More cool work by the AppsLab team. iBeacons are already in Apple Stores in the U.S., right? I think if you have iOS7 on the latest iPhone you can avail of them? So the question is… if you stroll into an Apple Store with this setup on your Glass, will it work? Road-testing with that corporate APPL discount?…LOL
Great work Noel
your work is an inspiration to us all here in Oracle
Thanks a lot for sharing your expertise! I am going to try this out with my Glass at Seats2meet.
I was able to import the project into ADT, Export the .apk file and side load it onto my google glass – very cool!!
I too am very excited about Beacons, and should have my Estimotes in hand shortly.
To get this to work with my Estimotes…can I simply update the Major and Minor values for office, kitchen and bedroom in BeaconService.java, and then Export the .apk from ADT?