Music to work to:
Beamer | dShed | Benjamin Miller
Beamer
15/01/08 12:00 Filed in: dShed
Broadcasting short films to mobile devices using Bluetooth in the Watershed Café Bar.
As part of 2007's Electric December we wanted to send video films to mobile phones quickly and cheaply. One method selected was to send the films directly to user's mobile phones using Bluetooth from inside the Watershed building. We were quoted approximately £2000 to enable this from a single access point for twenty four days. The 'transmitter module' would be shipped to us, we would install it securely in the building and supply it with an Internet connection. Set-up and Configuration would be done remotely. There wasn't a budget for this and we thought that Bluetooth broadcasting was a technology that would be useful for us to repeat so we allowed ourselves a few days to write the software.
We decided to write a desktop application (called Beamer). Strange when a daemon would perhaps have been a better choice but we hope one day to make the application an easy to use broadcasting application for any user with playlists and other features. We built a Cocoa application using Core Data to store discovered device lists and preferences. Bluetooth connectivity was handled using C functions and Objective-C methods in the IOBluetooth framework. The application was deployed on a Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo) running 10.4.10 for December 1st 2007.
Each day, a different film from Electric December is broadcast to mobile phone users in the foyer and Café Bar.
Statistics
The statistics listed are for the period December 1st - 24th, 2007.
Total number of devices detected: 2540. Although the Mac Mini was surrounded on most sides by copious amounts of tin foil to make the radio signal as directional as possible it often registered mobile phones from people walking along the quayside below or using the Chicago Rock bar. Beamer was only looking for phones, PDAs and similar mobile devices and this number does not include laptop and desktop computers.
Device names not registered: 972. Some users moved so quickly through the space that they were out of range before Beamer had a chance to ask the device for its name. For the first half of December the films were broadcast from Watershed's foyer, above the Box Office, but we noticed that apart from the periods when visitors queue for the cinemas in the evenings, a space with a large turnover of transient users is not ideal location. For the second half of the transmission period the Mac Mini was located in the Café Bar, below the spirits' rack, and this increased the number of names retrieved and connections attempted.
Number of users refusing a film: 104. Beamer would attempt to send the film to a user' mobile twice. If a device rejected the offer of a film twice it was never asked again for the duration of Electric December.
Number of films successfully transferred: 65. The films were transferred to 57 different devices so a small number of users, mostly staff, received more than one film.
Number of devices connection attempted: 1077. Beamer attempted to connect to roughly two thirds of the mobile devices that stayed around long enough to get the display name but only managed a connection in less than 20% of cases. There are many possible reasons for this and some in this broadcast include:
Daily Distribution
The number of films transferred roughly parallels the pattern shown by the Electric December web site. The largest numbers are recorded when interest in the project is high at the start of the month and gradually decreases over the month until just before Christmas when the project is forgotten.
In the early days of the deployment, kernel panics were frequent and and Beamer only managed to run for a number of hours at a time. Days two and five were days when the application was only running for a small number of hours. From the graph it can be clearly see that, unfortunately, some days Beamer didn't run at all. For the first part of the deployment, a kernel panic had locked up the machine and it needed to be restarted. Later in the deployment, the mains electrical supply was not turned on and the Mac Mini failed to start.
Future Bluetooth Applications
The number of films transferred, although not huge, is a promising start. Downtime was approximately 25% so the total number of films distributed could be improved upon easily. As well as future short film distribution, Bluetooth could also be used to distribute other information to users of the Watershed such as contact or screening information. Having written that, I'm not convinced that broadcasting, unannounced content out to mobile phones will ever be that successful on a large scale. I'm hoping at some point in the near future, to produce a 'kiosk' type viewer with user initiated wireless transfers to mobile phones and devices. Having the user send a film to their own device is far less intrusive and perhaps would be used widely.
As part of 2007's Electric December we wanted to send video films to mobile phones quickly and cheaply. One method selected was to send the films directly to user's mobile phones using Bluetooth from inside the Watershed building. We were quoted approximately £2000 to enable this from a single access point for twenty four days. The 'transmitter module' would be shipped to us, we would install it securely in the building and supply it with an Internet connection. Set-up and Configuration would be done remotely. There wasn't a budget for this and we thought that Bluetooth broadcasting was a technology that would be useful for us to repeat so we allowed ourselves a few days to write the software.
We decided to write a desktop application (called Beamer). Strange when a daemon would perhaps have been a better choice but we hope one day to make the application an easy to use broadcasting application for any user with playlists and other features. We built a Cocoa application using Core Data to store discovered device lists and preferences. Bluetooth connectivity was handled using C functions and Objective-C methods in the IOBluetooth framework. The application was deployed on a Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo) running 10.4.10 for December 1st 2007.
Each day, a different film from Electric December is broadcast to mobile phone users in the foyer and Café Bar.
Statistics
The statistics listed are for the period December 1st - 24th, 2007.
Total number of devices detected: 2540. Although the Mac Mini was surrounded on most sides by copious amounts of tin foil to make the radio signal as directional as possible it often registered mobile phones from people walking along the quayside below or using the Chicago Rock bar. Beamer was only looking for phones, PDAs and similar mobile devices and this number does not include laptop and desktop computers.
Device names not registered: 972. Some users moved so quickly through the space that they were out of range before Beamer had a chance to ask the device for its name. For the first half of December the films were broadcast from Watershed's foyer, above the Box Office, but we noticed that apart from the periods when visitors queue for the cinemas in the evenings, a space with a large turnover of transient users is not ideal location. For the second half of the transmission period the Mac Mini was located in the Café Bar, below the spirits' rack, and this increased the number of names retrieved and connections attempted.
Number of users refusing a film: 104. Beamer would attempt to send the film to a user' mobile twice. If a device rejected the offer of a film twice it was never asked again for the duration of Electric December.
Number of films successfully transferred: 65. The films were transferred to 57 different devices so a small number of users, mostly staff, received more than one film.
Number of devices connection attempted: 1077. Beamer attempted to connect to roughly two thirds of the mobile devices that stayed around long enough to get the display name but only managed a connection in less than 20% of cases. There are many possible reasons for this and some in this broadcast include:
- A connection was initiated but the owner frequently failed to notice the notification on the screen.
- The mobile device did not support the transfer protocols needed.
- Each film was around 1MB and many devices do not have enough storage to hold files of this size.
Daily Distribution
The number of films transferred roughly parallels the pattern shown by the Electric December web site. The largest numbers are recorded when interest in the project is high at the start of the month and gradually decreases over the month until just before Christmas when the project is forgotten.
In the early days of the deployment, kernel panics were frequent and and Beamer only managed to run for a number of hours at a time. Days two and five were days when the application was only running for a small number of hours. From the graph it can be clearly see that, unfortunately, some days Beamer didn't run at all. For the first part of the deployment, a kernel panic had locked up the machine and it needed to be restarted. Later in the deployment, the mains electrical supply was not turned on and the Mac Mini failed to start.
Future Bluetooth Applications
The number of films transferred, although not huge, is a promising start. Downtime was approximately 25% so the total number of films distributed could be improved upon easily. As well as future short film distribution, Bluetooth could also be used to distribute other information to users of the Watershed such as contact or screening information. Having written that, I'm not convinced that broadcasting, unannounced content out to mobile phones will ever be that successful on a large scale. I'm hoping at some point in the near future, to produce a 'kiosk' type viewer with user initiated wireless transfers to mobile phones and devices. Having the user send a film to their own device is far less intrusive and perhaps would be used widely.
|