Apple’s own Beacon – the iBeacon.
The University of Bradford is currently piloting the use of Beacons at Recruitment Events:
- To provide context-sensitive information and messaging to visitors at recruitment events to make their visit more seamless and engaging
- To gather data from visitors about their visit, including locations visited and journeys around the campus taken, to improve future activities
- To showcase the Beacons and Raspberry Pi technology, our student work and a collaborative approach to using new technologies from colleagues across the University
The Web Team is working with the Mobile Technology Team and a final year student (Stefan Mangu) in the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics and, having run a successful pilot at a recent Applicant Visit Day, will be rolling out the technology at forthcoming Open Days.
Apple have their own version of the technology, called iBeacons, but other Beacons are available.
Stefan comments:
“Mobile technology has progressed substantially in the past few years. There is a lot of focus nowadays on enhancing the user experience which, in effect, requires new or improved technologies. Working closely with University of Bradford IT Services, the Marketing Department as well as campusM, the ‘Beacons’ project focuses on enhancing the user experience at University specific events such as Open Days or Applicant Visit days as well as improving the day by day use of the ‘About UoB‘ app for current students and staff. From an architecture point of view, the Beacon/user interaction is custom tailored for each beacon/event/location. This is achieved by using a complex back-end system which implements the interaction logic.
“The whole system is still in Beta testing and recent tests were mostly focused around pushing location relevant content to end-users which proved really successful.”
The technology was piloted at a recent Applicant Visit Day and will be rolled out for the first time at the Open Day for schools and colleges in July.
We will be running a session on Beacons technology at the forthcoming IWMW conference and there was a session at the recent Digifest conference on ‘Harnessing the Power of Indoor Positioning Technology‘ from Edina which gives a good introduction.
We will keep you posted!
As a recruitment professional, who spends a lot of his time at fares and conferences I see this tech as having a huge role to play in the very near future.
Had heard about Beacons but didn’t know it had applications like this. Massively interesting. Any idea where I can read more about Stefan’s project?