Trial Is A Beacon Of Hope For Those Needing A Pointr
They have been about for well over two years, but have yet to take off. That may be about to change for Bluetooth Beacons.
These are small Bluetooth transmitters that interact with your smartphone as you wander around an indoor space and figure out exactly where you are to an accuracy of a few metres.
They have a variety of uses.
If they were installed in Birmingham’s Grand Central, for example, they could interact with a map of the mall, overlay a ‘You Are Here’ arrow and supply walking directions to those fabulous cakes at Paul Boulangerie.
At Solihull’s hotly anticipated new Waitrose, they could trigger an alert about a BOGOF offer on your favourite soup on detecting that you had reached the canned veg aisle.
While that might come, for now, a major trial has just begun.
A Bluetooth Beacon solution called Pointr has been installed in a London department store, a major supermarket, a London rail station and four major international airports.
It uses Bluetooth 4.0, which is enables on most phones up to about four years old.
Deploying these at transport hubs seems an excellent idea to help those who travel a lot, running against the clock to find the right train at London Waterloo, for example, can be a nightmare.
Dashing to the right check-in desk then making it to the correct gate on time at Schiphol, after a tiring business day, can be harder still.
Turning a phone into a pedestrian satnav in places like that sounds like a winner.
It takes a lot of Beacons to kit out a space, though, that London store swallowed up 450 of them.
