Re: Physical web project

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 2:13 AM, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com>
wrote:

> What would help us here is some idea of what your system looks like
> (in design terms), so that we could, in principle, include any
> requirements you may have in our work
>
Not sure I understand but I'll give it a shot: our system is a series of
hardware beacons that are broadcasting URIs using the BLE advertising
packet. These URIs are expected to be URLs but we are exploring other
encodings (e.g. URNs but that is a bit more speculative) This creates the
'senders' of our system. The 'receivers' (at this time) are phones running
an app. However, that is just for prototyping purposes. We expect this to
be built into the OS for most systems. The goal of these receivers is to
collect the nearby beacons, display them to the user WHEN THEY ASK (no
proactive beeping!) rank them in some way, and if the user taps on one,
take them to that web page. The receivers, much like browsers today, can
vary quite a bit (and even be proprietary) We don't expect to 'control' the
receivers and hope there is a wide range of experiments here. What we do
need to standardize however, is the broadcasting packet so everything sends
out a URI the same way.


>
> A question in return:  is the physical web already thinking what kind
> of interface is it going to have,  and would you benefit from input
> from this community (bearing in mind that we are a collection of
> individuals with different views on things),
>
Of course, that is why we released early to get hard questions and
experiments. The primary goal is simple: Show beacons to the user as simply
and easily as possible. Our current prototype uses the Android notification
manager (with no sounds or vibrations) so seeing nearby beacons is just two
taps. We expect other platforms to try different things.

Scott