Museum iBeacon Application

iBeacon and BLE technology is often being discussed in the media giving people new and intuitive ways to improve the retail and shopping experience. Here at Terracoding, we are looking at other areas that iBeacon technology could be applied to create rich and immersive encounters.

Local museum example

When walking around a museum, children can quickly loose interest, or feel that there is not enough content that is interactive for them. Another issue arises when there are a number of touch displays throughout the museum, and during peak times, those displays have lots of people surrounding them, meaning that unless you wait in a queue, you will miss some great content. Children’s minds need to be stimulated, and need something to keep them busy to prevent them from getting too bored. We want to help museums and other similar institutes by providing them with a platform for increased engagement by children, and adults alike.

It is well known that there are three main types of learning styles:

• Auditory learners (those who learn by listening)
• Visual learners (those who learn by looking, or reading)
• Kinesthetic learners (those who learn by touch, or by “doing”)

We want to provide something that gives a more complete learning environment, a well-rounded approach, that appeals to all three. We want to help build applications that give people a chance to learn more about the current thing they are viewing in a museum, whether that be by watching a related video, playing a related game or listening to auditory commentary. Providing this, and also something that is fun, to use would be extremely beneficial to the experience of learning from the exhibitions.

With iBeacon technology, plus our skills, we wanted to bring something that gives this amazing experience to as many people as possible.

Our proposition

We want to bring this technology and our platform to a few small or highly interested museums, galleries and similar experiences.

We have built a mobile application that can provide interactive maps, videos, images, and information as well as give the museum holders a way to see which areas of the museum are being visited by the most people, and at which time of the day.

We want a museum that can work together with us to bring an amazing and rich experience to the table for both children and adults alike.

If you think that you would like something like this, please get in touch.

Hack Day: iBeacons

Shops and malls are going to get pretty interesting with a relatively new type of technology that could help shoppers navigate around large stores, as well as improve the discovery of available offers in a store.

BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smart) is a technology that was introduced as part of the main Bluetooth standard in 2010 and also included in the Bluetooth 4.0 specification. Apple’s recent announcement of iBeacons alongside OS 7.0 has introduced a number of new ideas to both developers and owners of large shops and businesses.

The standard has been available on iOS devices since the release of the iPhone 4s, and can be utilised on Android devices running version 4.3 and later. However, the market share of Android devices using 4.3+ is only around 4.2%, as measured on December 2, 2013, so the main focus has been primarily with iOS.

So with all of this in mind, I bought some beacons from Estimote to hack away and see what I could come up with: