Have you ever walked into a building on a corporate or healthcare campus and struggled to find where you needed to go? Be honest, we have all been there. But did you know that wireless can help solve that problem? I’ve been working with various location based technologies for a number of years now but what Aruba has an amazing product offering via their Meridian team. They have managed to find a way to solve one of the biggest issues: mobile device development. I can remember back to a lot of the conversations I’ve had whether it be using AeroScout, Ekahau, or BLE solutions that ended with “by the way you’ll need to find an application development shop to finish this project” which pretty stopped the train on the tracks. This is a foreign concept for many organizations, they don’t have that team to be able to support it nor the mindset to realize what works and what doesn’t when it comes to a UI on a mobile device. But this is where Meridian comes in and steals the show. Signing up for their service GIVES you an application for mobile devices, no iOS developer needed! The app is built in such a way that it is a framework that then queries an online service for the content that should be displayed on the device. I can log into a web based application and add new “pages” to my app that reflect activities, locations, discounts, etc. This extremely flexible and easy to use concept isn’t just smoke and mirrors, it’s reality:
In a matter of 30 minutes I was able to setup indoor nav to important items in my house with @ArubaMeridian #WFD8 pic.twitter.com/XEwH5H65KH
— Blake Krone (@blakekrone) October 14, 2015
What other solution allows you to create an indoor navigation system in less than 30 minutes? None. The question now is how elaborate can I set this up at my house integrating home automation systems, streaming music services, etc? I can’t wait to continue to build on this platform and really see how powerful it can be!
Make sure you check out the rest of the #WFD8 presentation on the TechFieldDay Vimeo channel:
Aruba Networks Meridian Stadium Applications with Kiyo Kubo from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.
Also, here are some shots from the web application interface I mentioned, see how clean and intuitive it is?
