Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon hardware and new analytics software from Aruba, accompanied by GPS and new sensors working over Wi-Fi, can put the power of smartphones, carried by virtually all 29,000 students, in direct contact with the massive and growing amounts of university data. Aruba is a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.
"Students already have the smartphone technology in their pockets, so as they move about the giant buildings on campus, the user experience is more accessible. We can tie all our vast online resources to a location, combining the physical with the digital worlds," said Matt Cook, emerging technology librarian for OU's central library.
When a student wants to find a quiet group study room in the library, he or she gets turn-by-turn indoor navigation via mapping and GPS and then, once in the room, can be connected quickly to online instructions on how to connect a laptop to a large room display or other technology.
"For an incoming freshman who has never been to a building this big — it's seven stories and hundreds of thousands of square feet — you can use the tool you already have — the smartphone -- and get navigation and location-based content," he said.
Students can also use the maps produced by the system to find safe locations in the event of a tornado or other emergency. In one recent example, by using a beacon near one room, students could find out that a virtual reality (VR) talk was going to be held there at a specified time. (The university already has made a commitment to VR and has created VR fly-throughs for chemistry students wearing Oculus Rift headsets so they can learn about RNA molecules. A full-immersion VR classroom is also being built, with custom VR chairs.)
Last year, the beacons were deployed on a single renovated floor in the library and have now been expanded to the rest of the library and three other buildings. In a third phase, beacons will go campuswide. Later, beacons might be deployed in the wider town beyond campus.
One focus of the four-building deployment has been on the library's collection of original manuscripts by Galileo from the 1500s. Smartphone users can follow a blue dot indoors or a green dot outdoors to find related Galileo exhibits.
"It's a very big campus, so following the route down to one of the buildings on the smartphone makes it more convenient," Cook said.
Some day, the system could be sophisticated enough to help users find specific books or collections.
So far, there are about 50 Aruba BLE beacons in use on campus, all of them battery powered. The newest innovation is six Aruba sensors that operate with power from wall sockets and track the status of the 50 beacons, telling an Aruba Meridian server via Wi-Fi if a beacon is active or not. Cook said that as the system expands potentially to hundreds of beacons, it's important to have sensors to monitor the beacons so that a staffer doesn't have to wander the hallways to do the same work.
Aruba's BLE beacons at OU work in a wireless network configuration that's typical for the industry, Aruba explained. Beacons are simple devices that ping or chirp either to sensors, to register their status, or to a person's smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy. The beacons themselves don't connect to the central server. When a person's smartphone with its BLE radio receiver picks up the beacon's chirp, a smartphone app that is configured to receive those particular beacons is notified. Then, the smartphone and its custom app connect via Wi-Fi (or cellular, if available) to Aruba's Meridian servers; the server then tells the app to perform certain tasks, such as launching a predetermined map. The server also offers other centralized data, which could be about Galileo's life, for instance, or other information.
The user's phone knows its location on a map in relation to each beacon, but that's possible only by virtue of the Wi-Fi or cellular connection made by the smartphone to the server. "The beacons actually do very little," Cook explained.
Aruba Beacon Analytics software helps Cook gain useful user data, like how many unique visitors have used the beacon network. That kind of information can be used to help figure out where to place future beacons and how the network should grow.
Problems connecting with Android smartphones
So far, the beacon and sensor network has performed pretty well, Cook said, although there has been difficulty tracking Android smartphone users.
"It's been hit-or-miss because the Android experience has been tricky," he said. "Every Android user has a different piece of hardware, so you don't always get clean tracking." That means Android users may not see themselves on a map with a dot. iPhone users haven't experienced the problem.
Patient users who are willing to restart the mapping app can get it working on an Android device. "You can tell it's still a thing in the making," he said. "Aruba is working on it."
In addition, a weakness in a Wi-Fi zone can cause tracking problems. In big buildings with dense walls, a GPS signal will be difficult or impossible to get, and sometimes the cell-phone coverage indoors is poor and can't provide location data to replace the lack of GPS. "A combination of bad Wi-Fi and a thick building -– that's old school," he said.
Aruba prides itself on working with Wi-Fi access points from various vendors.The university has hundreds of Cisco Wi-Fi access points campuswide that can work with the Aruba technology.
Cook wouldn't divulge the university's total cost of the beacon system with the related Meridian software and sensors, but said that the software for the customized turn-by-turn Aruba application was "very affordable" compared to what it would have cost to develop it from scratch.
Aruba's pricing and privacy
Aruba said the new sensors will cost $195 apiece, and its beacons cost about $75 apiece. The starting price of Meridian software is $13,000 per year.
Aruba introduced beacons and related software in November 2014 and has other customers — some with many hundreds of installed beacons-- including Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., and Orlando International Airport. It would take about 1,000 beacons to cover an auditorium or a field like Levi's Stadium, at a list price of $75,000; an added 100 sensors would cost $19,500, Aruba said.
Privacy with the beacon technology isn't a concern, Cook said. The university's servers grab data showing where smartphone users have been in relationship to beacons, but the information kept on those servers is not available in real time and not specific to any single user, he said.
If a bad guy wanted to use sniffer technology to follow a user with a smartphone by relying on a beacon, that would be impossible, Cook said, because the beacons chirp outward and don't collect incoming information on who is using a beacon.
Aruba said it can perform beacon configuration changes remotely, and that's done through an encrypted channel.
Beacon market still in early stages
Despite reports that Apple's iBeacon technology hasn't grown as quickly as expected, there are still optimistic projections for use of beacons overall.
"Today, the number of beacons [shipped] remains quite small, but in terms of device shipments, we are forecasting over 3 million globally in 2015," said Patrick Connolly, an analyst at ABI Research. He predicted that 3 million figure will double in 2016.
There are already hundreds of companies selling beacons, Connolly said; ABI ranks Aruba as one of the top 25 in indoor location technology. Competitors include Cisco, Ruckus Wireless and Zebra for networking elements, and even Facebook and WeChat for apps. While Connolly described the indoor and proximity location market vendor ecosystem as "huge," he said that retailers have been "rightly very cautious" about deployments.
Beacons will be used in large schools, hospitals, airports and smart cities, as well as retail locations, he predicted.
"Despite recent media reports, the market is actually outperforming our initial forecasts," Connolly added. "We expect to see many winners across different vertical and regions. Indoor location is a utility just like electricity or heating and likewise will become commonplace everywhere. It is a huge greenfield space and the land grab is on."
Aruba can benefit from its status as a unit within HP, Connolly said. Customers already running HP servers could use beacons to help staff members find available meeting rooms in large corporate buildings, for example.
IDC analyst Rohit Mehra said an IDC survey shows that 40% of a few key industries plan to expand the use of Bluetooth Low Energy beacons for location-based services (LBS) in one to two years. However, institutions like OU won't necessarily be big players with beacons, he predicted.
"Where the rubber meets the road, where beacons provide real value, will be in retail, hospitality, public venues like stadiums and in transportation and logistics," he said.
The ultimate success of beacons will rely on a combination of Bluetooth beacons in a network that also includes Wi-Fi, he said. "To manage beacons, you need a Wi-Fi infrastructure.
"My view is that we have gone through some kind of illusion initially in terms of the rapid or explosive growth of Bluetooth Low Energy beacons," Mehra said.