What would be some of the better alternatives for doing indoor location? It'd help me a bunch to see a few examples, as I was previously thinking of beacons for this purpose.
You can do a better job of indoor location by using tv signals, than you can with beacons.
(All of the antennas are registered, along with type, propagation, etc, with the FCC, and they produce a large database)
Not that TV signals are great.
But even the bluetooth group itself says not to use beacons:
"According to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group,[24] Bluetooth is all about proximity, not about exact location. Bluetooth was not intended to offer a pinned location like GPS, however is known as a geo-fence or micro-fence solution which makes it an indoor proximity solution, not an indoor positioning solution."
Interesting thought. But I can't sample TV signals from a mobile device. I'm looking at applications that can be implemented underground as well, unique use case. And in this case, proximity might be just fine enough rather than positioning.
"Interesting thought. But I can't sample TV signals from a mobile device. "
You couldn't sample FM radio or GPS from them in the past either :)
But honestly, i don't expect this to take the world by storm either, i'm just pointing out it's a better possibility of working for the use case of "indoor mapping".
" I'm looking at applications that can be implemented underground as well, unique use case. And in this case, proximity might be just fine enough rather than positioning."
Underground is really hard, yes.
If all you care about is knowing you are within 40 feet, great.
Truthfully, specialized wifi points are likely to be better for indoor positioning than bluetooth.
So drop the GUID in favor of a simple coordinate system -- you have enough space for a latitude-longitude-altitude triplet, with a reasonable amount of precision.
Then you need to program your beacons at the time of placement, using whatever locating system you have that works but is too bulky/expensive/power-hungry/hard for users to use.
There are companies using Kinect to track users travelling through retail stores. There's also using existing WiFi recieved signal strength, which is not terribly granular but benefits from existing infrastructure.
