Bright Ideas In Indoor Location Awareness From Bytelight

All museums struggle to understand their visitors: their habits, what exhibits they visit, how long they stay at an exhibit. Current methodology involves an employee walking around the museum, following a group and logging what they do. If museums can get people using this technology for wayfinding, hard data will exist to show how people are moving around the building, how long they spend in places, and potentially what types of things they buy. This is the most interesting for the museum from a business point of view. With that data, MOS can even create heat maps and tell visitors in real time how busy each part of the museum is.

There are challenges though with all of this data. First, museums have to get people to actually use an app while experiencing the museum. The second struggle that they will have is resources. Content requires resources. As Check said, “If we are going to put an app out and make it available to visitors we have a responsibility to make it accurate and up to date. Technology is the easy part, remaining committed to the content using that technology is the bigger commitment.”

How does Check plan to fulfill his vision for indoor location awareness at the museum? There are many companies working on technology for indoor location awareness. Google is working on a system using WiFi for location triangulation, while other companies work on WiFi with Bluetooth or acoustic sensing. AT&T and Verizon have initiatives where they install repeaters inside a building. All of these indoor location awareness technologies require new chipsets on smartphones, and that’s a huge hindrance to any new technology. ByteLight founders Dan Ryan and Aaron Ganick want to see what hardware we already have and come up with a software solution.

ByteLight is a startup spun out of  research done by Ryan and Ganick as undergraduate students at Boston University in the communications between an LED light bulb and a smartphone. Similar to how GPS works, the LED light bulbs emit signals and smartphones listen for those signals to figure out their exact locations. ByteLight isn’t in the hardware business; it doesn’t manufacture light bulbs. What ByteLight does is work with lighting manufacturers to make their bulbs ByteLight-enabled. There’s no new hardware on the smartphone, just an app. This is the big innovation of ByteLight. The museum is doing a pilot with ByteLight in one exhibit hall at the MOS and has plans to roll it out to an entire wing of the museum. If the second phase goes well, they will roll the feature out to the whole museum.

Let’s dive a little deeper into how ByteLight-enabled LED light bulbs work. Each light bulb has its own unique ID code and is constantly broadcasting this code by modulating light on and off so fast that the eye can’t see it but in a way that an app using the phone’s built-in camera can detect. A ByteLight API integrated app has a map of the facility and knows exactly where the user is.

ByteLight has had a lot of inbound interest from museums and is engaging with them. MOS is the first pilot and acts as the first time the technology has gotten into people’s hands. The big focus for ByteLight is for retail and other commercial venues. ByteLight is working on a couple of pilots with bigger customers, but CEO Ryan couldn’t name any of those companies. Ryan made it clear that his company doesn’t see this is as a tracking technology but rather an engagement technology; it’s delivering highly targeted digital content to people in a particular point in space. Ryan’s larger vision is “using indoor location to connect the digital world with physical world and we believe the mobile device is a great way to do that.”

With indoor location awareness, everything that’s great about online behavior, about digital data collection analysis can be used to improve the physical experiences of spaces. The retail and commercial applications of this applications are wide open, Ryan shared just a few: standing in front of a product in a retail store, an app can deliver a coupon targeted to you based on where you are or the app can deliver user-generated content, such as a review.

As of this moment, what’s the killer need for indoor location awareness? A lot of companies are focused on wayfinding. Ryan believes that it’s a tie-in of the targeted digital content and augmented reality. Today, we’re still talking about the smartphone as the mobile computing platform for augmented reality looking through a camera. Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about wearable computing, like Google Glasses. For wearable computing and augmented reality to take off, you need an indoor location solution to understand the current context of where they are and what they’re looking at. ByteLight provides that missing link in indoor location awareness.

The museum’s Marc Check is always looking at other technologies for location awareness, but says that, “Bytelight is far above any other technology that we’ve been looking at and continue to look at. This is not just because of the technology, but also because of the partnership between the museum and the ByteLight team.”

The discussion about indoor location awareness boils down to it not really being a problem for the consumers in such places but rather for the indoor locations themselves. These places want to make the experience a good one for their visitors. The technology hasn’t existed to know where people are indoors and now it does. The possibilities that it enables is a wide open field. Nobody knew the applications for GPS before it was widely deployed; indoor location awareness will be the same way.