Developers have been using GPS and WiFi location detection to enhance their mobile applications and reduce the amount of input required by users by detecting where the user is at a given point in time. However these location detection techniques can only give an accuracy of approximately 10 metres, and are unreliable when the user is indoors.
Bluetooth Low Energy beacons (and in particular, Apples implementation ‘iBeacons’) give developers a way to solve this. By placing beacons in an environment applications can detect their location to a much higher accuracy than previously possible. This opens up a huge opportunity for a new wave of mobile apps that create amazing experiences within a physical location.
This session will introduce iBeacons, and discuss the opportunities they open up to developers. We will look at the technical aspects of what makes an iBeacon, and take a look at some of the aspects of the iOS iBeacon SDK. We will then use Xamarin to demonstrate in C# how to detect beacons in both iOS and Android environments.
This session is part of a new conference called Xamarin Hack Day. Michael Ridland, along with SSW, created Xamarin Hack Day to give developers the opportunity to get together and spend the day hacking away with Xamarin.