[djgagnon]

Hmmm. I also use Radbeacons. What does your UUID look like? Can you change it?

Also, can you confirm you are working on a device that has Bluetooth LE. Older models (3-4 years?) do not.

[whitlew]

When I copied and pasted the UUID, letters were capitalized and dashes were already included. I used both immediate and near proximity. For immediate, I had to be right on top of the beacon. For near, the conversation was triggered when I was about 15 feet away (give or take).

What helped me troubleshoot this was discovering the brand of the beacon I was using. Once I found the brand, I was able to learn that I needed the app. From what I could tell when I was searching the Internet for an answer, the beacons should come with a preset UUID? Maybe try calling customer service for the brand? They might have an app or something that could help configure the beacons.

Here is what my UUID looks like: 3Y237754-CB6D-4A0F-ADF2-F4800BA9JJA6 - I had the option to change it in the app, but I didn't.

I'm not sure how to confirm Bluetooth LE... I know these were recently ordered?

[chrish]

The device I've tried so far is a very recently ordered radbeacon. The uuid is 2f234454cf6d4a0fadf2f4911ba9ffa6. The strange thing for me is that the game won't load in ARIS. It gets partway and then ARIS crashes.

[chrish]

Okay, the crash was caused by the formatting. The UUID needs to be entered with dashes and capital letters as far as I can tell. Now I can actually get the plaque to trigger. Yay!

I'll see if I can play a bit with distances to develop some recommendations for ARIS settings of immediate/near/far (how close you need to be to the beacon?) and maybe the transmit strengths for the beacon itself. I have a feeling that fine tuning these will take some time in practice but may be worth the trouble when it matters.

[djgagnon]

Awesome. Yes, iBeacons are not an exact science. The distances are effected by the environment, the specific device and a bunch of unknowns. I think the immediate, near, far ranges determined from apple are a pretty good way of looking at it. It still means that multiple triggers are possible in a big room, a bunch are possible if you have folks actually place their device on a physical plaque.

I'm excited to see what folks will build!

[whitlew]

Hi again!

So, I know iBeacons can be used to trigger ARIS components like conversations. But, can a conversation trigger an iBeacon?

The result I'm trying to get is a user would select that they are looking for a librarian, which would trigger an iBeacon showing them where the reference desk is. At this point, they could walk there.

Any ideas?

[chrish]

I think what you're looking for may be possible, but I'm not sure in what sense the beacon would "show" the player where a place is. As I understand, the nature of ibeacons is just to indicate that the phone is in range (or within a few feet or right next to them).

But Locks do allow an author to link any content in ARIS to anything a player does that ARIS can keep track of.

[l-gun]

I ordered a few iBeacons (RadBeacon Dot) for our school history/interactive museum project, and am starting to test them.

So far I'm getting decent results using the intermediate setting.

One glitch, when I went from testing just 1 beacon to 2 was that, surprisingly, both beacons I ordered seemed to have come with the same UUID. This resulted in each beacon triggering both actions I had set up. Took me a bit to figure that out, but I was able to change the UUID of the 2nd beacon using the RadBeacon app.

Larry

P.S. With "immediate" setting I have needed to be almost on top of the beacon (about 20-30 cm) to get it to initiate trigger. On this setting, it seems like the player would HAVE to know exactly where the beacon is. So it would probably function pretty much like a QR code (i.e. Walk up to a known/marked spot to trigger something in the game), though perhaps less clunky than needing to exit to the scanner and scan the QR code.

[dmacphee]

I just got a new batch of iBeacons to use as triggers in simple treasure hunt activities using ARIS... and for some reason when playing the game, they DO WORK fine with my iPhone 6S (running 12.3.1) but DON'T TRIGGER when I use our iPad Mini 4s (also running 12.3.1).

These beacons are: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KNXBSTP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
set up in iBeacon format. They all came with the same UUID/major/minor specs, but I have reset them to be unique values.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?

Thanks