Originally posted on Geo Developers blog
Posted by Akshay Kannan, Product Manager
Today we're launching Nearby on Android, a new surface for users to discover and interact with the things around them. This extends the Nearby APIs we launched last year, which make it easy to discover and communicate with other nearby devices and beacons. Earlier this year, we also started experimenting with Physical Web beacons in Chrome for Android. With Nearby, we’re taking this a step further.
Imagine pulling up a barcode scanner when you’re at the store, or discovering an audio tour while you’re exploring a museum–these are the sorts of experiences that Nearby can enable. To make this possible, we're allowing developers to associate their mobile app or a website with a beacon.
A number of developers have already been building compelling proximity-based experiences, using beacons and Nearby:
Getting started is simple. First, get some Eddystone Beacons- you can order these from any one of our Eddystone-certified manufacturers. Android devices and and other BLE-equipped smart devices can also be configured to broadcast in the Eddystone Format.
Second, configure your beacon to point to your desired experience. This can be a mobile web page using the Physical Web, or you can link directly to an experience in your app. For users who don’t have your app, you can either provide a mobile web fallback or request a direct app install.
Nearby has started rolling out to users as part of the upcoming Google Play Services release and will work on Android devices running 4.4 (KitKat) and above. Check out our developer documentation to get started. To learn more about Nearby Notifications in Android, also check out our I/O 2016 session, starting at 17:10.
Posted by Nirdhar Khazanie, Product Manager and Yossi Matias, VP Engineering
Posted by Chandu Thota, Engineering Director and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager
Just like lighthouses have helped sailors navigate the world for thousands of years, electronic beacons can be used to provide precise location and contextual cues within apps to help you navigate the world. For instance, a beacon can label a bus stop so your phone knows to have your ticket ready, or a museum app can provide background on the exhibit you’re standing in front of. Today, we’re beginning to roll out a new set of features to help developers build apps using this technology. This includes a new open format for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons to communicate with people’s devices, a way for you to add this meaningful data to your apps and to Google services, as well as a way to manage your fleet of beacons efficiently.
Working closely with partners in the BLE beacon industry, we’ve learned a lot about the needs and the limitations of existing beacon technology. So we set out to build a new class of beacons that addresses real-life use-cases, cross-platform support, and security.
At the core of what it means to be a BLE beacon is the frame format—i.e., a language—that a beacon sends out into the world. Today, we’re expanding the range of use cases for beacon technology by publishing a new and open format for BLE beacons that anyone can use: Eddystone. Eddystone is robust and extensible: It supports multiple frame types for different use cases, and it supports versioning to make introducing new functionality easier. It’s cross-platform, capable of supporting Android, iOS or any platform that supports BLE beacons. And it’s available on GitHub under the open-source Apache v2.0 license, for everyone to use and help improve.
By design, a beacon is meant to be discoverable by any nearby Bluetooth Smart device, via its identifier which is a public signal. At the same time, privacy and security are really important, so we built in a feature called Ephemeral Identifiers (EIDs) which change frequently, and allow only authorized clients to decode them. EIDs will enable you to securely do things like find your luggage once you get off the plane or find your lost keys. We’ll publish the technical specs of this design soon.
Eddystone offers two key developer benefits: better semantic context and precise location. To support these, we’re launching two new APIs. The Nearby API for Android and iOS makes it easier for apps to find and communicate with nearby devices and beacons, such as a specific bus stop or a particular art exhibit in a museum, providing better context. And the Proximity Beacon API lets developers associate semantic location (i.e., a place associated with a lat/long) and related data with beacons, stored in the cloud. This API will also be used in existing location APIs, such as the next version of the Places API.
Eddystone’s extensible frame formats allow hardware manufacturers to support multiple mobile platforms and application scenarios with a single piece of hardware. An existing BLE beacon can be made Eddystone compliant with a simple firmware update. At the core, we built Eddystone as an open and extensible protocol that’s also interoperable, so we’ll also introduce an Eddystone certification process in the near future by closely working with hardware manufacturing partners. We already have a number of partners that have built Eddystone-compliant beacons.
As businesses move from validating their beacon-assisted apps to deploying beacons at scale in places like stadiums and transit stations, hardware installation and maintenance can be challenging: which beacons are working, broken, missing or displaced? So starting today, beacons that implement Eddystone’s telemetry frame (Eddystone-TLM) in combination with the Proximity Beacon API’s diagnostic endpoint can help deployers monitor their beacons’ battery health and displacement—common logistical challenges with low-cost beacon hardware.
We’re also starting to improve Google’s own products and services with beacons. Google Maps launched beacon-based transit notifications in Portland earlier this year, to help people get faster access to real-time transit schedules for specific stations. And soon, Google Now will also be able to use this contextual information to help prioritize the most relevant cards, like showing you menu items when you’re inside a restaurant.
We want to make beacons useful even when a mobile app is not available; to that end, the Physical Web project will be using Eddystone beacons that broadcast URLs to help people interact with their surroundings.
Beacons are an important way to deliver better experiences for users of your apps, whether you choose to use Eddystone with your own products and services or as part of a broader Google solution like the Places API or Nearby API. The ecosystem of app developers and beacon manufacturers is important in pushing these technologies forward and the best ideas won’t come from just one company, so we encourage you to get some Eddystone-supported beacons today from our partners and begin building!
Update (July 16, 2015 11.30am PST) To clarify, beacons registered with proper place identifiers (as defined in our Places API) will be used in Place Picker. You have to use Proximity Beacon API to map a beacon to a place identifier. See the post on Google's Geo Developer Blog for more details.
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.
