At Estimote, we believe software of the future will not be created for phones, computers, or tablets. It won’t be inspired by the 4.7 or 12.9 inch piece of glass sitting in our pockets, or on our desks. Instead, the developers and designers of tomorrow will use the physical world as their canvas. People, their personal devices and autonomous machines surrounding them will be the new building blocks for software, with developers designing interactions between them.
For applications to run the same way on different devices, they need an operating system - a universal way to understand the hardware. Applications for the physical world are no different. They need to know the position of the user, what objects are around them, and whether these objects are moving or not. They need a way to understand the world around them - an operating system for the physical world. We’ve been patiently building out the elements of this operating system, piece by piece, since Estimote was founded.
Automapping thanks to Location Beacons with UWB
Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we are launching Estimote Automapping. It is a giant leap towards enabling our community to easily install the Operating System for the physical world on top of any location. All you need are Estimote Location Beacons with UWB. Just place them on the walls in your office, retail store, or at home. A few minutes after you finish, an exact floor plan of your location will be automatically created in the cloud. With our easy to use mobile SDKs, you will be able to build your first application for the physical world in no time!
There are so many possible experiences to delight your users - step-by-step navigation, personalized engagement, product navigation. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You can use the information available even when the user has the phone in their pocket to improve your shop layout or product placement, based on foot traffic. Or even dynamically adjust the number of cashiers or shop assistants, if the number of people changes in an area. Not to mention that in a similar way, you can track critical assets throughout your venue.
What was the problem and how did we solve it?
Until now, the greatest obstacle with developing applications for the physical world was set up. Placing devices in hard to access spots, complex calibration procedures done by a highly technical crew… and you always need a floor plan. It’s hard, it’s complicated, and it’s tedious. It can take hours and cost thousands of dollars. At Estimote, we couldn’t accept that this is as good as it gets.
Our new Location Beacons are the first on the market with a built-in Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio. Thanks to a process called time-of-flight two-way ranging, the beacons can now know the distance between each other with inch-perfect precision. Leveraging this information, they can calculate their position relative to each other. With the help of the complex algorithms behind our Automapping solution, Estimote Cloud will determine the exact shape of your venue and make it ready for user positioning.
Pre-order your new Location Beacons with UWB now!
We’ve just made creating apps for the physical world easier and faster. Our new Location Beacons with UWB come now 4 in a pack so you can start developing right away!
You can also meet up with us this week, and see our demos at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Pre-order new Location Beacons with Ultra Wideband (UWB)
We will be shipping the first Dev Kits early 2017!