On Friday 14 March, Studio residents Tom Melamed and Sam Machin gave a lunchtime talk about the promises and pitfalls of iBeacon technology, and the possibility that this could be the first indoor location technology that actually works.

Tom began the talk by telling us a bit about their backgrounds. Tom works for Calvium, an app development company based here in the Studio. He has always had an interest in sensors, and is very interested in a new technology’s journey from something that is theoretically possible in a lab to something that is robust and useful in the real world. Sam has been working on the practical side of UK phone networks for most of his career, and is now a freelance tech expert in this field.

Tom and Sam began with a brief description of what a Bluetooth beacon actually is. The concept of a beacon has been around for years. It is something that announces its presence; a lighthouse is an obvious example. Tom described what an iBeacon does as ‘shouting in the dark’. It is broadcast technology at its simplest.

Bluetooth has not always been easy to use. The technology was designed as a cable replacement, where you had to manually set up a connection in order to transfer data wirelessly. The technology became clunky and awkward to use when people tried to do more with it.

That was old Bluetooth, Sam and Tom wanted to talk about new Bluetooth, known predominantly as; Bluetooth 4.0, Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smart. The old Bluetooth worked for things like headsets, speakers, file transfer, modems and connecting phones to laptops. Bluetooth Low Energy is now used for things like Smart Watches and Fitness trackers. Bluetooth devices like these are companion devices; they don’t need their own ip address, but instead connect to the internet through your phone. Bluetooth 4.0 is designed for transmitting short bursts of quick data. Your Smart Watch picks up the data because it is listening to a certain address, and then displays it. This kind of data transmission has low power consumption, hence the name Bluetooth Low Energy.

iBeacon is a formatted string of data; a string of numbers, or bytes, which say certain things. Contained in this string of data, is a UUID (a randomly generated ‘universally unique ID’, which is so large that the chances of using two of the same is nearly impossible). After the UUID, you have a major and minor ID, major could be used to identify a specific building, or shop, and then minor identifies the individual iBeacons themselves. The iBeacon then broadcasts this information every second.

Sam and Tom passed a few examples of iBeacon hardware around the audience; an Estimote beacon, which looks like a little rubber iceberg that you can stick on walls or ceilings, a BLED112 Bluetooth Dongle that you can programme to be an ibeacon, and a Raspberry Pi, programmed to transmit a beacon ID. You can also programme your macbook to broadcast a beacon ID if it has Bluetooth 4.0 on it, which is useful for testing.

Before GPS became widely used in phones, people couldn’t see quite how useful it would be. Since then however, there have been a lot of attempts to create an indoor location system that can tell us where we are in a building. Tom himself tried using ultrasound in the Watershed café/bar 15 years ago, but the signals were distorted by loose change and cutlery, which rendered it almost useless. Wifi works well enough to tell you roughly which building you are in, but doesn’t work accurately enough for indoor navigation. Custom radios require a lot of extra tech to carry around, and infrared beacons work well enough, but you have to take your phone out of your pocket and point it at things. Ultra-wideband is wonderful, but costs tens of thousands to set up properly. And using peoples’ mobile phone networks to track them is arguably illegal. People have tried magnets, compasses, RFID; all sorts, but none of these things give you what GPS gives you outdoors; the ability to know where you are without having to make any effort.

Lots of people are excited by iBeacons, because they are cheap, simple and inconspicuous. Tom had placed one iBeacon on the wall before the talk, and only one person out of the fifty odd people in the audience noticed it.  Tom was asked whether iBeacons were accurate enough to sense which picture you are standing by in a gallery. He replied that the technology wasn’t quite there yet, but it could probably sense which four pictures you were standing by, and you could select the one you were looking at on your phone. ‘If you go with the flow of the technology, and recognise what it’s good for, then you can fill in the gaps with the experience and application design.’

Tom, as part of Calvium, has recently been involved in an indoor navigation research project with UCAN, an organisation working with visually impaired young people in Wales to make the arts more accessible. They are working on creating indoor satnav for people who struggle to navigate in unfamiliar buildings. iBeacons could be the technology that helps this project to spread across arts institutions. Calvium have also been working with Studio residents ANAGRAM, on their immersive documentary, Door Into the Dark, which replaces the visual with the sensorial and explores the psychology of being lost. This was recently installed in Watershed as part of the iDocs conference, and iBeacons were used to trigger content in peoples’ headphones as they felt their way through the pitch-black space.

Sam and Tom spoke about some simple ways that this technology could be used at home, for example iBeacons could be turned on when your kettle has boiled or when someone rings your doorbell, to alert an app on your phone if you’re at home.

Tom went on to say that it is important to have a discussion about privacy when exploring new technologies like iBeacon. iBeacons are stupid, they don’t listen to you or gather any data; all they do is tell you that you are quite near them. What can be intrusive is the software that you put on your phone, which may use these location technologies. If you don’t trust an app, don’t let it talk to Bluetooth, or just delete it.

At the end of the talk, Sam and Tom offered chocolate to anyone who could come up with the best iBeacon idea. The winning idea belonged to someone whose work involves making communication aids for people who can’t speak. His idea was to use iBeacons to tell the communication aid that it is in a certain room, so that it can give a relevant suggested selection of words: e.g. In the school canteen, words from the menu could be suggested. This is a brilliant example of the potential uses of iBeacon, and how it can help us to navigate and be informed by our indoor surroundings.

Have a look at Sam and Tom’s slides from the talk here.