Building Applications with iBeacon

Chapter 1. Introduction

Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Frank Robinson

Close doesn’t always count when building mobile applications. Mobile devices typically have smaller screens and might have limited forms of text input. But the user profile of a device is not the major constraint on its function. At its best, an application that knows where you are will augment reality to help you navigate and interact with the physical world.

We have seen some tentative steps toward applications that interact with the world around them. Star maps use location information and accelerometer-derived tilt readings to highlight stars in the sky on a real-time picture from a phone’s camera.¹ Inexpensive GPS receivers have turned every smartphone into an up-to-date navigation system for drivers, turning archaic practices such as knowing how to fold a paper map or memorizing how to get around a city² into stories that we will someday scare children with.

Until now, no technology has enabled you to interact with the world within “arm’s reach.” That has changed with the introduction of Bluetooth proximity beacons, often referred to as iBeacons.³ Beacons bridge the gap between the data world of ones, zeros, and the glass screen on a mobile device and the physical world that users move through with their devices. By transmitting an identifier, a beacon can define a small area that devices react to, and those reactions can be used to create new applications ...