PiBeac aims to solve the logistics issues of paper forms and user issues of navigating the web. Instead of using search engines as the primary gateway to interactions with the web, users navigate a network of beacons. Beacons have an associated action (URL, form, hardware action, etc). Businesses purchase registered beacons from us and can edit their associated action through our web interface. Mobile users with Bluetooth LE enabled devices can detect beacons within range and execute the associated action.
Our solution also tackles a problem related to Human-Computer Interaction in the realm of computer science on the user side as well as the complications that arise on the business side with regards to manually processing paper forms. Since piBeac technology provides mobile devices with automated direct access to specific websites based on physical close-range proximity to the hardware, the most relevant websites are always available to the mobile user. This allows the mobile user to interact with the World Wide Web in a much more physical sense, as opposed to navigating through search engines and map UIs.
In the figure shown above, yellow is outside actor, green is user activated relationship, blue is automated relationship, purple are entities being built out by us, and red is entities already built out for us, such as the Eddystone Bluetooth LE protocol. As you can see in the diagram, our beacon entities do not have a direct relationship to the backend API, which allows for simplified complexity in updating associated actions and also reduces load to our servers as we don’t have several hundred beacons requesting their associated actions at short intervals. An internet connection for the beacons is not required as they only broadcast a UID. Mobile users query our API for the associated action when in range of a pybeac beacon. In this way, beacon managers (business owners) can update information for associated actions and it will be instantly updated for users already within the vicinity of a beacon.
