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.)
3 comments:
1. Not sure I understand the question, are you talking about how do you distribute the content to the individual 'BT servers' or how do the individual 'BT Servers' work?
2. I believe you can add chapter markers, but it is probably more a case of whether the device allows you to navigate the chapters.
Hi Ross,
1. I meant what software and hardware would I need to have to run a service that pushes files over Bluetooth? (I don't know anything about Bluetooth, so this may be a stupid question!)
Tom
Hi Tom,
What you exerienced was probably a trial by Cadw, of some "proximity marketing" system. There is a number of them available in the market today and they are usually a mini-pc, running either a windows application, which utilizes a windows bluetooth stack, or a custom linux distribution, utilizing a linux bluetooth stack.
I write about proximity and mobile marketing on a Mobile Marketing blog, so if you're interested in this area, feel free to browse through.
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