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mozilla-magnet / magnet-client

A nearby content discovery client for Android & iOS
Mozilla Public License 2.0
19 stars 10 forks source link

Proximity based discovery of LAN services #10

Open wilsonpage opened 8 years ago

wilsonpage commented 8 years ago

Problem

Advertising services via mDNS removes proximity filtering resulting in irrelevant content and excess noise. For example if I'm in a building with several rooms, I only really want to adjust the lights of the room I'm in, I don't want to see controllers for lights that are in other rooms.

Suggestion

For services that need to be on LAN to talk to other devices, but are really only relevant when you are in close proximity of them (eg. lights, music, coffee machine video), mDNS advertisement doesn't make sense. Instead we should advertise via BLE. Magnet will find the advertisement, but the content fetch will fail unless the user is on the relevant LAN.

Opening this issue to track and discuss.

wilsonpage commented 8 years ago

@arcturus feedback on this?

oteo commented 8 years ago

hi @wilsonpage I'm hearing that Beacons could potentially support the capability of adding additional GATT services. This would allow an interaction in which a mobile device connects directly to the beacon via Web Bluetooth without the need of having Internet connection. Would that address this scenario?

wilsonpage commented 8 years ago

@oteo potentially embedded tiles could use WebBluetooth if the underlying engine supported it and could be used to solve some cool use-cases. But IIRC WebBluetooth has not been embraced by any engines other that Chrome; therefore I don't think we can depend on it yet. It will likely be some time (years) before this is available on iOS :(