iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Sensorberg has a great new video that provides inspiration regarding what’s possible in the smart workspace:
This video also provides a learning for marketers. As with all the best ideas (and promotion), it’s often best not to mention how things are achieved – in this case predominantly using beacons. People don’t need to know this and are more interested in what it does, the benefits and how it makes people feel.
Mr Beacon has a new video interview with Dieter Fenkart-Fröschlt, COO of the San Diego Museum of Art. The video explains why the San Diego Museum of Art adopted apps and beacons and explains some of the challenges they have faced.
The museum has about 360,000 visitors per year, 18,000 works of art with 700 to 800 works of art on display at any one time. Apps and beacons became part of their strategic planning to change how people interact with the museum and bring enquiry based learning, more typical of natural history and science museums, to an art museum.
Apps and beacons are the solution to delivering more content than can be shown on walls. They provide the stories behind the art. While the initial aim was to engage more younger audiences, it turned out the apps are used by all ages. It’s interesting that people have “fallen in love” with the museum experience, not just the art itself.
One of the largest lessons learned was that “build it they will come” doesn’t apply. Rollout needed to be holistic. Frontline staff had to be trained and visitors reminded that the app is free and part of their admission fee. There’s also marketing at conferences, events, on business cards and obviously next to the artwork itself.
One of the incidental yet profound gains had been insights through data. The museum now knows how long people spend at the museum and at each exhibit. They know the most liked and most viewed art that helps work out what kinds of art are popular (or not!). This feeds into making the museum more popular through people returning, again something that can now be measured.
The museum has about 120 beacons and the functionality of the app changes depending on whether the user is in the museum or not. Visitors can access related videos, introductions to artists and other objects in the museum related to given art. The app also displays images, for example showing how the art has changed, through conservation, over time. There are also app scavenger hunts for kids.
The main initial challenges were physical : How to fix the beacons to to walls and blend them into the colour of the wall.
View the Video to discover more
BeaconZone’s very first beacon apps were related to tagging artwork at the Folkstone Triennial, Frieze London, Saatchi Gallery and the Fine Art Society . The Mr beacon video doesn’t mention any of the technical challenges of using beacons in visitor spaces. For example, there can be problems relying on connectivity indoors that requires solutions such as intelligent caching. Care also has to be taken to prevent excessive triggering, something that becomes more complex when adjacent beacons transmission overlap. If you need more help, consider a Feasibility Study.
There’s a new heritage trail of Little India in Singapore that uses Physical Web beacons to guide visitors through unique facts and stories, historical photographs, and crowd-sourced content.
The article on their web site is a great example how you can a) provide clear instructions on how to use the Physical Web and b) provide an incentive to start using. In the case of the trail there’s a contest. If you use your mobile device to access the Little India Physical Web Experience you can redeem a gift.
There’s an interesting article at code4lib on Creation of a Library Tour Application for Mobile Equipment using iBeacon Technology by Virginia Tech. It describes a project where a QR code driven library tour was updated to use beacons.
Some insights include how attractive beacons can become ‘lost’, the problem of replacing batteries, limited battery life due to the iOS requirement for beacons to advertise every 100ms and challenges physically fixing beacons.
As mentioned in our article on Choosing an Advertising Interval, it’s possible to set the advertising interval to between 300ms and 600ms while maintaining a reasonable detection time. Also, had the library chosen Android tablets they could have used a much longer advertising interval. 100ms is an artificial thing set by Apple for very quick detection on iOS devices. On Android, the scanning is more controllable,you can scan for longer and hence have beacons that advertise less often and have much longer battery life.