Today I visited Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire with my family. Cadw, the government body that manages the castle, were running a trial to deliver audio files to visitors' mobile phones using Bluetooth. As I walked through the entrance I simply made my phone discoverable, waited a few seconds for the MP3 to download, then started listening to a guided tour of the castle. It's a great use of the technology: it just worked.The talk only lasted a few minutes, so we had plenty of time afterwards to run around the ruins.
A couple of technical questions that sprang to mind:
- How would you set up a server to push files over Bluetooth? (There are loads of ways you could use this - maps of the local area at transport hubs, sharing the schedule at conferences, random photo of the day at home, etc.)
- Can you make audio files navigable? That is, make it easy to go to the part of audio file that is about a given exhibit by typing in the exhibit's number? (This problem reminds me of Cliff Schmidt's talk about the Talking Book Device at ApacheCon EU 2008.)