VR, Digital Twins and Bluetooth Beacons

There’s new research from School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, Dublin into using Bluetooth beacons to enhance Digital Twin VR Experiences. The paper BeTwin: Enhancing VR Experiences with BLE Beacon-based Digital Twins integrates Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons with a digital twin environment to enhance and customize a virtual 3D platform.

The beacons are used to bring information from real objects into the virtual platform. The article investigates the impact of beacon distance, energy levels and the number of beacons on the system performance. The proposed mechanism employs beacons to easily add and remove objects in a real-virtual world twinned context.

The findings indicated that the most time-consuming aspect of the system was the generation of objects, which was largely dependent on the duration it takes for the VR application to receive and process messages from the Raspberry Pi. The experiments showed that the application can efficiently handle beacon messages and create corresponding virtual content provided that the beacons are positioned in close proximity to the beacon reader.