As iBeacons increase in popularity, venue managers may wonder what it’s like to install them. If so, let me point you in the direction of an informative article from the Brooklyn Museum, which is going through the process of installing 150 iBeacons in its 500,000-square-foot facility. While museums aren’t one of IAVM’s primary venue types, I believe many of you can relate and imagine your own venue when reading this article. For example, there’s the issue of different wall types:
“…we’ve had a lot of problems actually getting these to stay put on the walls. It’s no secret we have a tough production environment here; we use different types of paint (gloss, flat, semi) and our walls vary in surface (plaster, glass, sheetrock, cement). No matter what we do, we’ve found beacons are constantly falling off walls…constantly.”
Then there’s signal strength inside a building:
“Beacon signal, for instance, is disrupted by everything save air…walls, vitrines, objects, people, you name it. This problem is so bad, in fact, that I can be standing directly beside a beacon on the wall, and will find a stronger signal coming from one across the room.”
As I mentioned, “The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale” is an informative article and presents some first-hand experiences you should consider if you go down the iBeacon path.
(photo credit: Media Hack Days 2014 via photopin cc)
