Introduction and Eddystone vs iBeacon
Smartphones don't just connect to nearby cell phone towers. Proximity beacon technology has been around a few years in the form of Apple's iBeacon, which allows an iPhone or iPad to connect to objects – called beacons – using Bluetooth.
Retailers, museums, sports stadiums and anywhere else with large numbers of smartphone users can now use beacons to provide hyper-local information down to the exact aisle, exhibit, or seat. Airports, zoos, concert halls and shopping malls are now being fitted with Bluetooth-powered beacons that let smartphones pick up adverts, notifications, and even navigate indoors. However, since its launch in 2013, the iBeacon infrastructure has been built up with only iOS users in mind. Step forward Google's Eddystone.
What are proximity beacons?
A beacon is a miniaturised Bluetooth radio that can be placed almost anywhere. Google wants us to think of beacons as lighthouses (for some reason Eddystone is named after a lighthouse in Cornwall, England), helping us navigate with precise location and context.
"A beacon can label a bus stop so your phone knows to have your ticket ready, or a museum app can provide background on the exhibit you're standing in front of," writes Google in a blog post. Such environments could have a fleet of beacons ready to push information to a smartphone when it passes by. Eddystone and iBeacon use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a wireless communication standard that can broadcast uniquely identifiable messages when in 'advertising mode'.
What is Eddystone?
Crucially, Eddystone is much more than just iBeacon for Android. It's an open format, available on GitHub under the open-source Apache v2.0 license. Not only can it be used to communicate with both Android and iOS devices, but Eddystone can work with web browsers as well as apps.
Eddystone-ready beacons can broadcast URLs, so if you're in a museum you can get notifications straight to your phone without first having to download that museum's custom app. However, whether it will be able to instruct, say, the native Passbook app on an iPhone to get a plane ticket ready when you arrive at the airport remains unclear.
How does Eddystone compare to iBeacon?
Both Eddystone and iBeacon have a similar goal – contextual information – and both rely on BLE tech. But as well as being open, extensible and interoperable, Eddystone is designed to go much further than iBeacon.
"We've learned a lot about the needs and the limitations of existing beacon technology," says Google, "so we set out to build a new class of beacons that addresses real-life use-cases, cross-platform support, and security." Security is everything for Eddystone, which includes a feature called Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs). These EIDs require authorised clients to decode them, and regularly change. Google suggests that EIDs will make it possible for people to securely locate their beacon-laden luggage, or find lost keys.
Eddystone also promotes better location, not just allowing smartphones to communicate with nearby beacons, but to translate into more useful, real-world measurements; Eddystone can talk in latitude and longitude, too. That could make it useful in wild areas and national parks where hikers and walkers struggle with phone signals, at least for sporadic events (as such it seems a marketing shoe-in for the Brecon Beacons National Park).
Google has also promised that Eddystone will integrate into Google Maps and Google Now to offer better, more targeted and faster access to real-time public transport schedules – something that's already being trialled in Portland, Oregon.
Global picture and crowd-sourced data
How significant is Eddystone?
Google and Apple's technology may seem very similar at the core, and with iOS phones huge in Western countries, it's tempting to say that Eddystone won't be especially significant. Globally, the picture is different. "Given the fact that 8 out of 10 smartphones in the world are based on Android, the potential impact of this technology is immense," says Radek Tadajewski, CEO of Internet of Things device maker Oort. "Industry insiders and analysts envision a world where shopping malls and city streets are saturated with beacons, which can be setup to broadcast marketing messages to all Android smartphones in their vicinity."
Are new beacons required?
No – only a firmware update is needed for a beacon to become Eddystone-compliant. The new tech is being tested with beacons from hardware manufacturers including Kontakt.io, Bkon, bluvision, Radius Networks, Signal 360 and Estimote, all of which will soon sell Eddystone-compatible beacons off-the-shelf.
What else could Eddystone do?
Although it's being talked-up as beacon tech, Eddystone can be adopted into any Bluetooth-equipped device. That's why some think that Eddystone technology could have applications way beyond simple beacons, with Internet of Things devices now expected to use Eddystone to learn from, and adapt to, patterns of behaviour. A coffee machine will remember when its user wakes up each morning, and prepare a brew in anticipation.
"Thanks to analytics, it will also determine when we are running out of coffee and offer automated home delivery," says Tadajewski, who thinks that Eddystone at last brings manufacturers of commodity devices a communication channel with its customers. "Each light bulb, thermostat, smart socket or smart finder that uses Bluetooth can leverage this communication method and be used to gather various data such as location, temperature, humidity, etc," says Tadajewski. "Such devices will also be able to send messages with links to any Android user nearby."
Crowd-sourced data
It's also expected that Eddystone will bring retailers both crowd-sourced data on customers and highly detailed knowledge about the movements of specific shoppers around aisles. Linger next to a big ticket item such as a 50-inch TV, a smartwatch or a car and you'll likely be buzzed a discount voucher. However, there could be costs – Google will always know exactly where you are, where you've been, and where you're going next.
Either way, there's no doubting that Eddystone – and the BLE tech behind it – could be about to change the way we communicate with infrastructure, and even how shops, malls, offices and public buildings are designed. This is the physical web, and it's coming to a town near you.
source TechRadar: All latest Mobile phones news feeds http://ift.tt/1fO95Ii
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment