Due to a work project I got the task to write an augmented Reality App for iOS which is used indoor. The project room is around 40m² big. So I came up with the idea to use beacon, like a lot of users. Unfortunately I have read quite negative post regarding proper indoor location and ibeacons. But because you are offering “special” location beacons I am just wondering if you think the accuracy is useable for the following:
My idea is to place like 6 beacons in the room. A person is holding an iPad and walking around in that room, only that room. Whenever the device is pointing towards an machine station the is supposed to recognize that and display real life machine datas. To do that I only came up with the idea to use a 2D “map”. So its just a linear system and I could find out the position by converting the RSSI into a distance and at the end do some trilateration. Regarding the persons position the device is sometimes pointed to north or sometimes south to display information about the same machine. So this is basically the reason why I need the persons location in the room to dertermine the viewdirection correctly and furthermore find out if the device is really pointed to the direction of a machine.
So do be honest, after reading some other posts I am not really sure if that will work in an acceptable way. Because its a showcase project it doesn’t need to be perfect, but still accurate enough to show the right information. What do you think? Should the Location package work just fine or any alternatives?
Hopefully you understand what my project is about, otherwise just ask and I will try to explain it more detailed.
There’s some truth to people challenging the use of beacons/Bluetooth for indoor positioning—the physics of the 2.4 GHz radio waves do indeed make it very difficult to get good accuracy.
However, most of the negative reviews focus on things like trilateration, or are written by people who spent a week or two trying to make it work. At Estimote, we shipped our first version of Indoor Location in September 2014, and we started working on it months before that, so all things considered, we’ve been hammering at this for close to 3 years now. And yes, we also started with trilateration, but quickly ditched it in favor of other, more complex solutions, because yes, trilateration with beacons is extremely hard to pull off.
So all in all, I’d recommend it for you to just give it a try and see for yourself. We have some first production deployments of Indoor Location already in place, and the feedback has been mostly positive. Your use case seems very demanding, so I wouldn’t want to promise it’ll be easy, but definitely sounds doable (:
If you want to start right away, all you’ll need is two dev kits of the Location Beacons.
If you don’t mind waiting a few more weeks, we expect to start shipping pre-orders of our new “Location Beacons with UWB” soon:
Thank you for your answer.
I don’t doubt that your products satisfy a lot of customers but as you said my case is quite challenging. Due to my tight schedule I want to avoid try and “error”, therefor I am checking the market for alternatives.
An alternative was also the UWB, which is nice to hear that you will ship UWB beacons soon. What are the prices for that?
I checked out your linked announcement but I got the feeling its pretty much only for the floorplan, but I can be wrong. The “inch-perfect precision” sounds interesting, but how would I locate a device/ person somewhere within that floorplan? Do you offer Tags or something like that to attach to the object which needs to be located? Or would I “just” need to put a beacon onto my Tablet?
When will they be shipped? Cause a few more weeks is quite a big time scale in my case. 8 would be to late, 2 would be perfect
@heypiotr After thinking some days more about the whole thing I came up with a new idea. Assuming I am using 3 + normal estimote Location beacons. As mentioned before trillateration is one method to locate a person. Due to its inaccuracy, what would you think about combining it with a accelerometer and a compass, both built in sensors of a device. Should that combined lead to a pretty close location?
I just need to figure out something suitable for my case explained in my first post.
Would be very please about any comments from your sites about that.
