Posted by Hoi Lam, Developer Advocate
If your users’ devices know where they are in the world – the place that they’re at, or the objects they’re near – then your app can adapt or deliver helpful information when it matters most. Beacons are a great way to explicitly label the real-world locations and contexts, but how does your app get the message that it’s at platform 9, instead of the shopping mall or that the user is standing in front of a food truck, rather than just hanging out in the parking lot?
With the Google beacon platform, you can associate information with registered beacons by using attachments in Proximity Beacon API, and serve those attachments back to users’ devices as messages via the Nearby Messages API. In this blog post, we will focus on how we can use attachments and messages most effectively, making our apps more context-aware.
Suppose you are creating an app for a large train station. You’ll want to provide different information to the user who just arrived and is looking for the ticket machine, as opposed to the user who just wants to know where to stand to be the closest to her reserved seat. In this instance, you’ll want more than one beacon to label important places, such as the platform, entrance hall and waiting area. Some of the attachments for each beacon will be the same (e.g. the station name), others will be different (e.g. platform number). This is where the design of Proximity Beacon API, and the Nearby Messages API in Android and iOS helps you out.
When your app retrieves the beacon attachments via the Nearby Messages API, each attachment will appear as an individual message, not grouped by beacon. In addition, Nearby Messages will automatically de-duplicate any attachments (even if they come from different beacons). So the situation looks like this:
This design has several advantages:
In designing your beacon user experience, think about the context of your user, the places and objects that are important for your app, and then label those places. The Proximity Beacon API makes beacon management easy, and Nearby Messages API abstract the hardware away, allowing you to focus on creating relevant and timely experiences. The beacons themselves should be transparent to the user.
In most cases, the data you store in attachments will be self-contained and will not need to refer to an external database. However, there are several exceptions where you might want to keep some data separately:
In these cases, you might need to use a more generic identifier in the beacon attachment to lookup the relevant data from your infrastructure.
With beacons, we have an opportunity to delight users by connecting the virtual world of personalization and contextual awareness with real world places and things that matter most. Through attachments, the Google beacon platform delivers a much richer context for your app that goes beyond the beacon identifier and enables your apps to better serve your users. Let’s build the apps that connect the two worlds!
Posted by Akshay Kannan, Product Manager
Mobile phones have made it easy to communicate with anyone, whether they’re right next to you or on the other side of the world. The great irony, however, is that those interactions can often feel really awkward when you're sitting right next to someone.
Today, it takes several steps -- whether it’s exchanging contact information, scanning a QR code, or pairing via bluetooth -- to get a simple piece of information to someone right next to you. Ideally, you should be able to just turn to them and do so, the same way you do in the real world.
This is why we built Nearby. Nearby provides a proximity API, Nearby Messages, for iOS and Android devices to discover and communicate with each other, as well as with beacons.
Nearby uses a combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and inaudible sound (using the device’s speaker and microphone) to establish proximity. We’ve incorporated Nearby technology into several products, including Chromecast Guest Mode, Nearby Players in Google Play Games, and Google Tone.
With the latest release of Google Play services 7.8, the Nearby Messages API becomes available to all developers across iOS and Android devices (Gingerbread and higher). Nearby doesn’t use or require a Google Account. The first time an app calls Nearby, users get a permission dialog to grant that app access.
A few of our partners have built creative experiences to show what's possible with Nearby.
Edjing Pro uses Nearby to let DJs publish their tracklist to people around them. The audience can vote on tracks that they like, and their votes are updated in realtime.
Trello uses Nearby to simplify sharing. Share a Trello board to the people around you with a tap of a button.
Pocket Casts uses Nearby to let you find and compare podcasts with people around you. Open the Nearby tab in Pocket Casts to view a list of podcasts that people around you have, as well as podcasts that you have in common with others.
Trulia uses Nearby to simplify the house hunting process. Create a board and use Nearby to make it easy for the people around you to join it.
To learn more, visit developers.google.com/nearby?utm_campaign=nearby-api-714&utm_source=gdbc&utm_medium=blog.
