I’m working on an art piece where there will be a stage with dancers and the music should correspond to their location on stage and maybe their proximity to each other.
Should I use location beacons and tie phones to dancers Or should I tie sticker beacons to the dancers?
If I go with stickers then will I be able to get the signal into my macbook pro (where the sound software will be able to get the data and change the music)?
You might find this guest blog post from the guys at The Reference digital agency interesting, they were implementing something quite similar:
I guess stickers would be easier to put on the dancers than Location Beacons … or phones. Just keep in minding that stickers have limited range (10–15 meters), and to reliably estimate proximity, you need a fairly strong signal, so Location Beacons might actually be a better option.
Both Beacons and Stickers broadcast regular Bluetooth Low Energy packets, so any BLE-compatible device can pick them up: MacBook Pro (assuming a fairly new model w/ BLE support), Raspberry Pi w/ BLE module (Rasp Pi 3 comes with one already built in), etc.
Great answer and reference, thanks! One last uestion - Indeed I have a modern Macbook Pro which I will use to run this. However, I only see SDKs for mobile platforms. How could I build my app on a mac? I need to do it on the mac since my sound software that gets the data will run on it. Thanks again
We only provide official SDKs for iOS and Android, but there are some 3rd party options for other platforms. My personal favorite for UNIX-y devices (MacBooks, Raspberry PIs, Intel Edisons, etc.) is this Node.js library: