Choosing the right harware for an art project

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.

  1. Should I use location beacons and tie phones to dancers Or should I tie sticker beacons to the dancers?

  2. 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)?

Thanks!

Interesting idea! (:

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 :slight_smile:

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: