How Useful are BLE Beacons for Mobile Guides?

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an important technology for enabling the Physical Web. This paper examines the use of BLE beacons for the discovery of content in mobile guides implemented as Progressive Web Applications. Cilogi is a framework for the creation of guides that run on mobile devices. BLE beacons are small devices that broadcast their identity to nearby mobile devices using much less energy than classic Bluetooth devices. The new Eddystone message format broadcasts enables broadcasting of a URL. This makes BLE beacons an alternative way of communicating the URL of individual pages of a mobile guide in an exhibition setting. This paper examines whether BLE beacons are a viable alternative to existing means of local content discovery. We conclude that BLE beacons are satisfactory for initial discovery although differences exist in platform integration. We make recommendations of how the technology can be developed to enable installed web applications to notify users when relevant beacons are discovered and propose that further work investigates user acceptance on a larger scale.