iBeacon Region Basics
22:39Beacon & Beacon Region
You might be aware of geographical region , a larger area defined by a circle of a specified radius around a known point on the Earth’s surface.Similarly a Beacon region is a smaller area defined by a circle of a specified radius around a known point which can be in a tent , or in a park, or in a shopping mall etc.
If Geolocation is positioned with the help of Satellites, the micro-location (location in a beacon vicinity) is positioned with the help of beacons.
Think about beacon as a very small lighthouse. Smartphones that are in range are able to 'hear' these signals, can identify the lighthouse and also can estimate proximity of their location very precisely.
Through your smart phone, a Beacon at the door of a store can greet you, maybe tell you of special offers, ask what you seek using Siri voice technology.
The iBeacon technology arrived, almost unnoticed, with the release of mobile operating system iOS7, at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in June 2013. The iBeacon works on Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE).
It is now an integral part of the customer experience in all 254 Apple stores in the United States.The iBeacon is expected to be a start of a technology revolution.
Few Points on iBeacon
- To monitor an iBeacon region, it requires an App installed in the iOS device and should be launched at least once (Running is not necessarily required.)
- Requires iOS 7.0 or later.
- Beacon ranging depends on detecting the strength of Bluetooth low-energy radio signals, and the accuracy of those signals is attenuated (or lessened) by walls, doors, and other physical objects. The signals are also affected by water, which means the human body itself will affect the signals. It is important to be aware of these factors when planning your iBeacon deployment because they will impact the proximity value reported by each beacon.
- An app can expect to receive the appropriate region entered or region exited notification within 3 to 5 minutes on average, if not sooner. Region events may not happen immediately after a region boundary is crossed. To prevent spurious notifications, iOS doesn’t deliver region notifications until certain threshold conditions are met. Specifically, the user’s location must cross the region boundary, move away from the boundary by a minimum distance, and remain at that minimum distance for at least 20 seconds before the notifications are reported. Average distance of beacon range is 200 meters.
- Monitoring will not work in the following cases
- The device doesn’t have the necessary hardware to support region monitoring.
- The user denied the app the authorization to use region monitoring.
- The user disabled location services in the Settings app.
- The user disabled Background App Refresh in the Settings app, either for the device or for your app.
- The device is in Airplane mode and can’t power up the necessary hardware.
Read about iBeacon Region Monitoring
0 comments