The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our physical surroundings and thus build entirely new experiences. However, our evaluations of BLE and its abilities to facilitate mobile location-based experiences in public environments revealed a number of potential problems. Most notably, the position and orientation of the user in combination with various environmental factors, such as crowds of people traversing the space, were found to cause major fluctuations of the received BLE signal strength. These issues are rendering a seamless functioning of any location-based application practically impossible. Instead of achieving seamlessness by eliminating these technical issues, we thus choose to advocate the use of a seamful approach, i.e. to reveal and exploit these problems and turn them into a part of the actual experience. In order to demonstrate the viability of this approach, we designed, implemented and evaluated the Ghost Detector - an educational location-based museum game for children. By presenting a qualitative evaluation of this game and by motivating our design decisions, this paper provides insight into some of the challenges and possible solutions connected to the process of developing location-based BLE-enabled experiences for public cultural spaces.
black Today a range of solutions, such as WiFi or Global Positioning System (GPS), allows mobile users to interact with physical spaces based on their location. There is however a particularly strong case to be made for BLE as a preferable solution for public cultural spaces, such as museum exhibitions. For instance, an analysis of the performance of BLE in indoor positioning applications, carried out by Faragher and Harle @cite_2 , found that even a relatively sparse deployment of BLE beacons results in a significant positioning improvement compared to existing WiFi infrastructures. Specifically, the study found that the positioning error of a WiFi tracking scheme was less than 8.5 m 95 black In line with the findings of Wein, we sought to create an alternative museum experience while leaving the original space intact, rather than contaminating it with QR codes, NFC tags and other tools. The limited size of BLE beacons made it feasible to store them within a drawer or underneath a shelf, thus allowing us to simply enhance selected locations in a museum space through an invisible layer of information accessible through mobile devices.
@cite_2
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This study investigated the impact of Bluetooth Low Energy devices in advertising beaconing mode on fingerprint-based indoor positioning schemes. Early experimentation demonstrated that the low bandwidth of BLE signals compared to WiFi is the cause of significant measurement error when coupled with the use of three BLE advertising channels. The physics underlying this behaviour is verified in simulation. A multipath mitigation scheme is proposed and tested. It is determined that the optimal positioning performance is provided by 10Hz beaconing and a 1 second multipath mitigation processing window size. It is determined that a steady increase in positioning performance with fingerprint size occurs up to 7 ±1, above this there is no clear benefit to extra beacon coverage.