Can you use BLE beacons configured for iBeacon ranging with Coarse Relocalization?

Question

I'm developing a Xamarin Forms iOS application for vision impaired museum visitors using Azure Spatial Anchors. We have an existing deployment of iBeacons in the museum (for another purpose) that I would like to leverage to improve Coarse Relocalization. The beacons all share a specific UUID, differentiated by Major/Minor values. In the Coarse Reloc documentation it is recommended to assign unique UUID's to each beacon for best results. I was hoping for some results, but it doesn't appear to detect the beacons when provided the single UUID. Are per-beacon unique IDs a requirement, or is there a work around to use iBeacons configured for ranging? Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Hi @Bill Jackson ,

Thanks for your post. We have reviewed the scenario and discussed with the team here. As you have found, we recommend having a unique ID. We do not have currently code in ASA to look further than the UUID. So, any versions set would not be considered as data to use for the location.

If the same UUID is used for a beacon in close proximity, it will not be recognized and will not raise an event for the application. For the design to make sure the UUID is unique, we have the general recommendation to be sure use a unique UUID since success may vary if the same UUID was used on different floor but same area. We have had similar questions on using beacons in museums and we have went with the unique guid recommendation which allows for the meta data to be easily mapped too.

Thanks,
Nathan