Estimote : The future of indoor geospacing and augmented reality ?

Yesterday, my boss gave me an estimote box, containing 3 beacons. Each of these beacons acts as a bluetooth emiter, allowing a receiver to know how far the beacon is.

As far as I understood how it works, the strenght of the signal is the key to know how far the beacon is. A strong signal means that the beacon is close to the receiver (your phone for example), and of course, on the opposite side, a weak signal tels us the beacon is far away. Bluetooth signals can be altered by objects, walls, human bodies, ... but it seems that the API provided by the estimote team is able to compute the distance anyway.
To be honest, I didn't tryed the API yet : I prefer to imagine what I can do with this new toy first !

What can we do with only one beacon ?
Well, I could create somekind of a "find me" game. You can find back the beacon because the closer you are, the stronger the signal is.
You could also put it in a shop : if a customer gets close to the beacon, you can push discounted products straight to his phone. That's the example they give on their website.
Interesting... but this only gives me the ability to track one target location, which is the beacon's location.

What could we do with two beacons ?
Imagine we have a long wall full of products. On each sides of the wall, we have one beacon. The API will tell us how far we are from the yellow beacon, and how far we are from blue one. It means that we should be able to know where the receiver is.

This is good, because if we want to know if the receiver is close to the shirts in the middle, 2 beacons ensures us that the consumer is not "outiside" the room. On top of this, this allows us to track all of the positions between the two points. But this method does not tell us if the receiver is on the right side of the wall, or on the other side. If the receiver is on the other side, the distance between the yellow beacon and the phone, and the blue beacon and the receiver will remain the same...

What could we do with three beacons ?
Pretty much the same, but we will be sure, this time, that the consumer is on the right side of the wall !

In other word, with 3 beacons, we could know where the receiver is, anywhere in the room !

But imagine we want to lead our customer to the shirts within the square. We are able to know where he is, where are the shirts, but we are not able to tell him if these shirts are on his left, right, in front or behind him, because a point is a point, and a point does not have any direction...

except... is we use another sensor : the phone's gyroscope ! This could tell us the direction the phone is pointing at, giving us the missing part of our equation.

Let's go 3D
The 3 points of our triangle, created by our 3 beacons, gives us a "flat" triangle (who has ever seen a triangle which is not flat anyway ?). The position of the shirts, or even the consumer, gives us a fourth location, allowing us to create some kind of a pyramid. But the thing is that we will not be able to know if our pyramid is pointing up or down...
To give an example : Let's say the 3 beacons are on the floor. The customer holds his phone in his hand, so the phone (the receiver), is not on the floor. We know, because we have a brain, that the pyramid created by the 3 points and the phone makes a pyramid pointing up... But in fact, distances between the various beacons and the receiver would be pretty much the same if the receiver is floor below...

What could we do with four beacons ?
If we stick one more beacon on the ceilling of the room we ensure the customer is really in the right room, and not on another floor. I think we have to put this in a way our four beacons are not on the same plane, in order to create a 3D space.

Adding the sensor capabilities to our reflection, we could also tell if the targeted point (the shirts) are up or down... If we go a little bit further, we can even imagine coupling this with the phone's camera ! The idea behind this, is to point your phone to a distant target, watch the camera's picture, and see some kind of an inlaid text that says "hey, these shirts are discounted !".

Of course, this will not really work if there are walls and stuff between the consumer and the discounted shirts, but I guess we could put some knowledge about these elements in our system, right ?

On top of this, I think this would be much more performant to create indoor augmented reallity at the size of a room than using image processing, which is not processor free...

Another usage example : Imagine you are in a museum, pointing at a painting or a sculpture could give the visitor more informations about it... nice, huh ?

I'll not be able to do that as I have only 3 beacons in my hands, but I'll try to play with "2D" geospacing anyway.

What could we do with five beacons ?
The same as previous... except each beacons will not be a SPOF in our system :)