Building Context-Aware Apps with Beacons

Transcript

1. Building Context-Aware Apps with Beacons Greg Shackles Senior Software Engineer, Olo greg@gregshackles.com @gshackles
2. nycmobiledev.net @nycmobiledev nyalt.net @nyaltnet
3. If context is king… …apps are the keys to the kingdom
4. Right Here and Now
5. Geofencing ✤ Uses GPS, WiFi, Mobile Network ✤ Accuracy varies wildly based on methods used ✤ Can be within a few meters or few thousand meters ✤ Indoors? Good luck ✤ Battery intensive
6. Geofencing
7. Ditch the map, let’s talk proximity
8. It’s All About Context
9. Case Study: Retail estimote.com/retail
10. Case Study: MLB Stadiums
11. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Specification Bluetooth Bluetooth LE Distance/Range 100m (330ft) > 100m (> 300ft) Throughput 0.7-2.1 Mbps 0.27 Mbps Voice Capable Yes No Power Consumption 1W 0.01 - 0.5W Latency 100ms 6ms
12. Bluetooth LE is Already Everywhere
13. So What Are Beacons? ✤ No pairing necessary ✤ Advertisement broadcast contains everything ✤ Key advertisement pieces: ✤ UUID: 128-bit, defines a group of beacons ✤ Major: 16-bit unsigned integer, create subset of UUID ✤ Minor: 16-bit unsigned integer, create subset of Major
14. Beacon Ranges 1m 10m 100m Immediate Near Far Approximated, never rely on actual beacon distances NFC only works here
15. Software Beacons ✤ iOS 7 devices, starting with iPhone 4S, iPad 3 ✤ Mac OS X, requires external adapter on Yosemite ✤ Android L devices
16. Hardware Beacons
17. What Can Talk to Beacons? ✤ iOS 7+ devices ✤ Android 4.3+ devices ✤ Windows Phone 8.1: not supported (womp womp) ✤ maybe in Windows Phone 10…
18. Interacting with Beacons ✤ Proximity ✤ Immediate ✤ Near ✤ Far ✤ Works in foreground ✤ Notified on entry/exit ✤ Works in background Region Monitoring Ranging
19. AltBeacon ✤ iBeacon specification is private (shocking, right?) ✤ Proposed open proximity beacon specification ✤ Authored by Radius Networks altbeacon.org
20. Estimote Stickers (Nearables) ✤ Beacons for physical objects ✤ ~3mm thin ✤ Rich broadcast data, including: ✤ Motion ✤ Temperature ✤ Orientation ✤ Temperature
21. The Physical Web ✤ Experiment from Google ✤ Aims to remove dependency on beacon-specific apps ✤ Beacons embrace the web by advertising URIs ✤ urn:uuid:f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e6bf6 ✤ https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2141.txt google.github.io/physical-web
22. By the way… These technologies aren’t mutually exclusive
23. Let’s Code!