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Physical-world context 101: Proximity vs Location

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There’s a ton of beacon use cases, each of them unique in needs, goals, and audience. Talking to a vast community of developers helped us crystalize these needs. To tailor our stack towards them, earlier this year we split our beacon product line into two: Proximity and Location Beacons. The split was essential to mark two different strategies towards microlocation: proximity and location. Read on to learn what we mean by that, what the pros and cons of each approach are, and which one will suit your project better!

Proximity and Location beacons

Proximity: context is near

Proximity includes all the use cases where context is provided within certain areas. Let’s say a user enters a shop and receives a “Welcome” notification, or a coupon for a new flavor pops up when you walk by your favorite ice cream shop. This most popular approach involves “tagging” certain areas (a hotel lobby, a restaurant table, an airport gate, etc.) with a “marker”—a beacon—recognizable by smartphones. You can tune beacon’s broadcasting power to adjust the range of this marker. Each beacon has a unique identifier (iBeacon UUID/Major/Minor, Eddystone UID, etc.). Your app can simply detect it in the proximity, read its identifier to figure out which marker it is, and act accordingly.

Proximity GIF

The upside? Simplicity—just place a bunch of beacons around, add detection code to your app, and voila: outstanding user experience begins! For the vast majority of use cases, you don’t really need super accurate indoor navigation to deliver location-based context. Want to know which table the customer is sitting at? Just place a beacon on it, and don’t worry about floor plans, tables changing their placement, etc. Easy as that! That’s how Downtown app, among many others, enables their amazing dining experience.

And with Physical Web introduced recently, you don’t even need an app anymore—just “mark” an area with a beacon broadcasting Eddystone-URL and take users to a website for more information about the place.

Proximity approaches can even be used to provide very basic indoor positioning. Since you know which markers are nearby, you can plot the user’s rough position on a map, and provide basic instructions (“go to the second floor”) to guide them around.

All of that is why it’s the most popular approach on the market right now, winning the hearts of thousands of users all over the world. Our Proximity Beacons have always been optimized exactly for this purpose. They are cost-efficient, support all the necessary formats (iBeacon, Eddystone-UID, Eddystone-URL), and they feature configurable range and identifiers to customize your “markers.” Pair all this with our Estimote SDK, enabling you to detect users entering and exiting the marked areas, and you’ve got yourself a smart, proximity-aware app.

Location: get granular

Sometimes, you need more precision. Museums with many exhibits in a single hall. A parking lot with hundreds of spots. A huge shopping mall full of nooks and crannies that makes you feel lost in a jungle of stores. That’s why two years ago we embarked on our journey to build Indoor Location, enabling more complex and robust mircolocation projects. With this approach, we take a floor plan, distribute beacons evenly inside, and our secret-sauce algorithms carefully analyze the data from the beacons to give you an exact (x,y) position inside that space. This is a huge step up over the “you are somewhere near” approach. Once your app knows the (x,y), it can look up the three nearest museum exhibits, mark the exact position of your car in a parking lot, or guide you to a shop you need through the maze of turns and corridors.

Location GIF

Alan Kay famously said: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” We are really serious about Indoor Location. Introducing Location Beacons was a major move forward. Longer battery life allows you to work on more aggressive advertising settings necessary for accurate Indoor Location. Additional fleet management and security options make deploying and maintaining the required amount of beacons a breeze. They also support our own Estimote Location data packet that provides Indoor algorithms with more data, and also enables Indoor Location to work in the background on iOS. Location Beacons are simply tailored for Indoor Location, becoming the first version of hardware dedicated to the location approach. Together with Estimote Indoor Location SDK, they turn a smartphone into a sophisticated compass to position and navigate in any venue.

(Admittedly, Location Beacons with their superior battery life, more power saving options, extra security features like support for Eddystone-EID, extra sensors, GPIO—are also a great choice for the proximity approach, so they are worth extra consideration, even if you don’t go for the Indoor Location capabilities.)

Pick and get started in 30 minutes

So now you know! Choose the proximity approach with Proximity Beacons and Estimote SDK to easily add physical world context to your apps with digital markers—a dev kit with 3 Proximity Beacons is just $59, and bulk pricing starts at $19 per beacon. Adding simple beacon detection code to your app with Estimote SDK will take you 30 minutes with our tutorial.

Need something more? Looking for most robust and granular location context to build into your app? The location approach, Location Beacons, and Estimote Indoor SDK for iOS have you covered—you’ll need one or more beacons per wall, so get two or three dev kits of Location Beacons ($99 for a kit). Our Indoor Location app for iOS will help you map your space out in just a few minutes, and then our tutorial will help you integrate Indoor into your own app. You’ll be getting the (x,y) in the same 30 minutes!

If you have any thoughts/ideas to share or questions to ask, drop us a line at contact@estimote.com or ping us on Twitter. We’re always here to help!

Liliya Matsuk, Community Manager at Estimote

Piotr Krawiec, Product Manager at Estimote


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