Be Memories is an interactive tourist guide which uses IoT devices called Smart Spots to transform the cultural Point of Interest (POI) into an interactive areas denominated as Smart POI (Smart Point of Interaction). These smart areas create a new communication channel between the cultural offer and the visitors through multimedia format as short videos where the local residents told stories and anecdotes about the territory in short-time interviews.
The users can interact with the Smart POIs thanks to their Smartphone through Wi-Fi network created by the Smart Spot, an IoT devices that creates an open Wi-Fi access point. The open Wi-Fi network of the Smart Spot uses the city internet network or a SIM card, depending on the location and available infrastructure. When the user connect their Smartphone to the indicated Wi-Fi network, a Progressive Web-App with content about the location is automatically opened.
“Be Memories was a successful project in Ceuti (Spain) with more than 400 connected users in 15 days”
Be Memories has been deployed in Ceuti (Spain) http://bememories.es/ and it has had a good acceptance between the citizens and visitors of the village. The report provided confirms that during the an analysis of 15 days more than 400 users have connected with the main Smart POI and seen the video-interviews, achieving 30 users per day.
Be Memories in Flame: Virtual Smart POIs in the M-Shed
Be Memories is working with the Flame environment to adapt this tool to Bristol and Flame platform, changing the Smart POI (hardware infrastructure) to a virtual concept to deploy inside of the Flame network as an added service available for Flame platform environments. The data about the video playback were stored through an event register to test the capabilities and difference between the Flame platform and Ceuti infrastructure and the both use cases data (Ceuti and Bristol) were cross to establish the main advantages and use cases between the both infrastructures.
“Two virtual Smart POIs in two confronted towers of the Millennium Square to offer content based on location”
For that, HOP Ubiquitous has developed a Large Trial between the 3rd to 5th of June, based on two virtual Smart POIs in two access point in M-Shed square (Bristol) with two different videos located in different points of the square. Through this channel, the users who visit the square are able to access to a content designed by their location.
The final results of the Large Trial in Bristol are composed by more than 70 interactions with the Be Memories tool collected by the event register and 50 survey participants who valued Be Memories experience.
The main idea has been preserved in spite of not having a captive portal for loading application directly with Wi-Fi connection on each point, such as we have implemented in Ceutí with our edge nodes. However, it has been resolved properly with adding a link to Be Memories FQDN into smartphones dealt to users and Wi-Fi access points configured for auto connection. Users only should change their position and see the content change with the connection to another FLAME access point.
To deploy this, it has been prepared three different SF, the first of them, is responsible of hosting the backend server where are controlled comments, likes, users and places of interest with its video links for each point. This server is separated of rest and will be individual, only there will be an instance, just like storage SF, which is the central video server where are all videos for download on edge nodes. The storage and backend SF will be deployed on data cluster, dc8-sr3-cluster1-cluster. The last SF was in charge of offer to users the interface and web page of Be Memories application, it was called bememories, contained the frontend of application. Are deployed two bememories SF with the same FQDN to access. FLAME allows to deploy different SFE on different clusters with the same URL to access, and the platform redirect the request to closer cluster from devices connected to each access point.
The main results of the trial were the following:
- Reduce latency for content provisioning of device communications: The average of initial load time is lower in the Flame infrastructure than in Ceuti. These values have been measured from the loading of the application to the start of the video. Both values are almost identical, although it has been possible to improve a few milliseconds and of course reduce below 3 seconds. When it has concurrent users connected, the Bristol infrastructure was behaving better than Ceutí but both interruption time average is very low.
- Expand the multi-source retrieval of the solution: The both trials had a high quality video (Full HD – 50FPS). According to the quality of video playback in both infrastructure, the Flame use case provide better quality videos than Ceutí. The main reason of that is the infrastructure capacity. According to the quality perceived by the user, 66% of Bristol sample assessed with 5 stars and 30% with 4 stars.
- Build a solid connectivity interference-free and an increase in bandwidth: The data collected ensure that interruption average time is really low, in FLAME 372 ms (≈1/3 s) and in Ceutí the time is 1285 ms (≈1 s). The sample showed that the 70% of the users answer the video has been played fluently and the 26% had suffered one interruption.
- The Be Memories tourist guide had a good assessments between the sample of both trials. In Bristol the 50% of them valued with 5 stars the tool and 34% with 4 stars. In Ceuti, the 56 % of the sample value the tool with 5 stars and it is only one valuation with less than 4 stars. More than the 95% of both cases the user love this type of tools during their visits.
- The both access point of Flame creates a high level Be Memories experience. In the 63% of users interactions with both Smart POIs, the Web-App content changed when the user went to the other Smart POI automatically, without the need of any user action.
- Increase the content security, privacy control and geolocated content provisioning: The number of hops was reduced due to FLAME’s current infrastructure in MShed, customizing content for each position. In addition, the data are contained in platform and aren’t owned by private companies such as Google with its private storage or Youtube, in terms of videos. Geolocation is known by FLAME’s clusters location and the use of edge computing.
Blog by Andrea Gomez and Arturo Haro, HOP Ubiquitous