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Rohde & Schwarz
Hack your environment. Discover and use the data available at your current location to create a map that can be used for indoor navigation. You can use all sensors available in your mobile phone to profile your current location, including (signal strength of) Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth beacons, current compass heading, etc. When you have sufficiently trained your app, use it to guide a person from the lobby to the hotel bar.
Everybody knows (and obviously uses) navigation by satellites. Satellite navigation nowadays works outdoors (like a charm), in urban environments (most of the time), indoors (almost never). In city centers, knowing the location of Wi-Fi access points now sometimes reduces the necessity for satellite reception. Adding more data can increase accuracy of your location information even further, e.g. the location of cellular base stations and other remarkable sights like NFC tags or Bluetooth beacons. Discovering the location of cellular base stations is actually not that hard with a regular cell phone and even easier with Rohde & Schwarz measurement receivers. Again, the task is more difficult in city centers (think of buildings reflecting radio waves) than it is in the open. Network providers, who want to make sure their customers have excellent coverage anywhere, rely on Rohde & Schwarz technology to fulfill that task. Since we can’t send you off to drive around in Munich hunting for cell towers, the challenge is about hunting Bluetooth beacons instead.
Around the conference area, we have placed several Bluetooth beacons that transmit their IDs continuously to everyone who cares to listen. After a long day discussing difficult topics, many MobiSys participants won’t want to speak any more but instead they look for relaxation and special places like the bar or the pool. Of course, you as a conference organizer want to help the participants to find these points of interest, but you don’t want to draw a detailed map of the location and all its wireless markers.
Write an app for a mobile phone that can direct its user from the reception to either the bar (on the same floor, easier task) or the pool (on different floor, therefore harder task). The app may take into account any hints on the location it deems necessary (Wi-Fi hotspots, Bluetooth beacons, compass value, distance travelled, cellular signal strength, ambient lighting, characteristic sounds …). The Bluetooth beacons are scattered all over the area in a way that there is probably at least one beacon in the transmitting range and the beacon location won’t change. You will not receive a set of coordinates or any other means to pre-train your app. Use the wireless information to train a mobile phone to discover a rough indoor map. You can train your phone as long as you find necessary – for the conference organizers it would obviously be easier if they had to walk around to discover the map only once. Based on your newly discovered map, allow the user to find the shortest path from the reception to bar/pool and guide them along the path (simple commands like “turn 90 degrees right”, “walk straight” are sufficient). The best guidance app wins.
A set of bluetooth beacons scattered around the hotel area. The beacons support both iBeacon and Eddystone standards. Bring your own mobile phones/scanner devices and prepare an appropriate IDE.
- For an Android device we recommend Android Studio 3.0 or higher
- For an iPhone we recommend an up to date xcode environment (9.3 or above)
- For a Windows device we recommend Visual Studio 2017 and the Windows IoT SDK