'Follow me': a web-based, location-sharing architecture for large, indoor environments

We leverage the ubiquity of bluetooth-enabled devices and propose a decentralized, web-based architecture that allows users to share their location by following each other in the style of Twitter. We demonstrate a prototype that operates in a large building which generates a dataset of detected blue...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ypodimatopoulos, Polychronis (Contributor), Lippman, Andrew B. (Contributor)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory (Contributor), Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012-08-28T18:37:52Z.
Subjects:
Online Access:Get fulltext
Description
Summary:We leverage the ubiquity of bluetooth-enabled devices and propose a decentralized, web-based architecture that allows users to share their location by following each other in the style of Twitter. We demonstrate a prototype that operates in a large building which generates a dataset of detected bluetooth devices at a rate of ~30 new devices per day, including the respective location where they were last detected. Users then query the dataset using their unique bluetooth ID and share their current location with their followers by means of unique URIs that they control. Our separation between producers (the building) and consumers (the users) of bluetooth device location data allows us to create socially-aware applications that respect user's privacy while limiting the software necessary to run on mobile devices to just a web browser.