

A study of Louvre visitor behavior using Bluetooth data - Thevet
http://senseable.mit.edu/louvre/

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click170
I love the way you can plot people's movements via bluetooth, but it's also
the reason I turn my own bluetooth off.

I wonder if there's a need for something that broadcasts like bluetooth does
with minimal power, but allows you to change your identifier at will instead
of relying on your MAC address. An app on your phone would let you configure
how often your token rotated, or to not broadcast at all. The problem that I
see with this is that nobody would install the app because it provides no
benefit to them. Maybe that's what's missing, such tracking needs to be
beneficial for the customer but at the moment it benefits only the retailer.

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pdknsk
I wonder why they used Bluetooth when the Louvre already has over 500 WiFi
antennas in place for their guide.

[http://www.nintendo.co.jp/csr/en/report2013/02_2/index.html](http://www.nintendo.co.jp/csr/en/report2013/02_2/index.html)

[http://louvreguide.nintendo.com/](http://louvreguide.nintendo.com/)

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this_user
I did work on a project concerned with tracking via Bluetooth a couple of
years ago. Depending on the way you try to locate the mobile devices one
advantage of Bluetooth can actually be its smaller range compared to a Wifi AP
that's running at its full range.

With regular consumer hardware it is basically impossible to use signal
strength indication between an AP and a mobile device to do any kind of
serious range estimation. Your best bet is therefore to use a whole grid of
APs. The easiest way to locate devices is then to run all of them with a
limited range and locate mobile devices based solely on proximity to a single
AP. A more complex but potentially more accurate solution would be to run them
with larger overlapping ranges and calculate the mobile device's location
based on the intersections. Running too many Bluetooth APs that actively
broadcast for peers, however, may have the unintended side effect of jamming
the 2.4 GHz band.

All in all, I actually agree that Wifi is the better solution nowadays.
Symbian was the last smartphone OS that had Bluetooth set to visible by
default. Since the switch to Windows all of the major smartphones will be
invisible by default which was not the case in former years. Also, quite a few
smartphone users will have Wifi enabled at all times which means their phones
will actively broadcast for networks which makes them easy to track in a
passive way using hardware that is already installed.

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degenerate
Curious, is the entire map, data points, and movement coded in d3? Or is this
a mash-up of d3 and other libraries?

