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The Physical Web: walk up and use anything
http://physical-web.org
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Link to a Map / Image #562

Closed ihmunro closed 8 years ago

ihmunro commented 8 years ago

Afternoon

Just thought I would ask a question with regards to the URLs.

For example, if I have a number of Eddy Beacons in a room, I can via Chrome etc. see the links - not a problem there, but wanted to see if it was possible to display a map of current eddy Beacons in the room.

Any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

Iain

patrickkeane commented 8 years ago

Your map would probably look a lot like an electron cloud around the observer's gps coordinates, because there is no way to infer a beacon's direction only approximate its distance, whether they're Eddystone or not.

Caveat: Unless the Eddystone beacon offered the its specific geolocation (and nobody moved them after configuring and placing them) via the advertised URL. But, not as a general rule -- and it has really nothing to do with BLE at all. For some very specific use-cases, that may make sense however?

A while back I experimented with triangulation using three beacons and signal strength/loss to estimate distance. I found it wildly inaccurate -- primarily due to signal interference from obstructions, even over large number of samples. Obstructions as simple as how the phone is held in addition to nearby physical objects had a significant impact on narrowing the likely position of the observer.

Cheers, PK

On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 8:45 PM, ihmunro notifications@github.com wrote:

Afternoon

Just thought I would ask a question with regards to the URLs.

For example, if I have a number of Eddy Beacons in a room, I can via Chrome etc. see the links - not a problem there, but wanted to see if it was possible to display a map of current eddy Beacons in the room.

Any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

Iain

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/google/physical-web/issues/562.

patrickkeane commented 8 years ago

It is an interesting question though. The more I think about it, the more I think it MAY be possible to do something interesting by using many RSSI samples of all beacons in a room and their changes relative to each other as you move about to determine some likely relative positions (to each other) -- That and a whole lot of trigonometry.

On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 8:45 PM, ihmunro notifications@github.com wrote:

Afternoon

Just thought I would ask a question with regards to the URLs.

For example, if I have a number of Eddy Beacons in a room, I can via Chrome etc. see the links - not a problem there, but wanted to see if it was possible to display a map of current eddy Beacons in the room.

Any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

Iain

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/google/physical-web/issues/562.

febinsathar commented 8 years ago

I think triangulation would be a bad idea. It is possible to predict the user location via fingerprinting by training a KNN or a Neural network, given we have enough beacons to cover the area and we have pre collected the BLE rssi fingerprint as well. Inorder to get it up and running in chrome browser, chrome need to enable support for javascript api for BLE such that we could collect the available BLE rssi at a given point and predict it realtime.

ihmunro commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the feedback - I think everyone is going a little further than I was looking for.

For example - if I had 10 Eddys in a room that had 10 assets, if 5 of those assets leave the building, I was hoping to see a map that still had the 10 Eddys, but 5 would be greyed out because there would be no signal.

Makes sense ?

Iain

febinsathar commented 8 years ago

It is possible via an android/ Ios app. But if a web app/ physical web app need to discover the presence of beacons in a vicinity javascript bluetooth API should have to be enabled (which is not enable by default in chrome browser).

scottjenson commented 8 years ago

Well, the current Physical Web client assumes beacons are dynamic so only displays the ones it sees (and can be verified by the Physical Web Service) If you wanted something like this, you'd have to write your own client, you'd just have to also ask for a physical location and then store beacon URLs against that location so you could remember what you previously saw (so you could show old ones in grey). The tricky part is that you're likely indoors and GPS is a bit flakey so you'd have to be careful what you registered as a "location".

scottjenson commented 8 years ago

If no further comments, I'm closing but please reopen if necessary