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Magnet Architecture

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Maria Angeles Oteo edited this page May 31, 2016 · 4 revisions

Magnet Solution is composed by three different elements:

Beacons

Beacons are how physical objects “announce” the URLs they are linked to. A beacon could be based on Bluetooth Low Energy or on WiFi mDNS. The URL the beacon announces is typically configured by the beacon owner with some tools provided by the Beacon manufacturer. The amount of information the beacon can send is very limited, and hence, apart from the URL, nothing else can be sent (e.g. no chance to announce also information such as an icon or a human readable label). The URL could be a link to a twitter account, to a video, to an intranet website, etc.

Magnet Client

The mobile device is the main “consumer” of the URLs announced by the beacons. The way the mobile device interacts with the beacons is via the Magnet Client, which is available for Android and iOS.

Magnet Metadata Server

he magnet metadata server provides additional information about beacons. It does show by analysing the URL and looking for additional metadata. Multiple types of additional metadata information could be offered for every beacon, for instance:

  • Name: A human readable name for the beacon.
  • Icon: An graphical resource linked to the beacon.
  • Widget: A small, minified representation of the Beacon URL Website. The idea of the widget, is that it can be directly embedded in the Magnet application so the user can get more information about the URL behind a beacon without the need to click on it.

MAGNET MAIN FLOW:

magnet_architecture

  1. The Magnet Client scans which beacons are announcing URLs nearby either via Bluetooth or mDNS and retrieves the URLs linked to all the discovered ones.
  2. The Magnet Client makes a request to the Metadata Server to check if it has additional information about the Beacons it has just discovered.
  3. The Magnet Client shows the information about every beacon in an “optimized” way. Typically a “tile” is shown for every beacon. The content of the tile could be based on the additional information available on the metadata server or on an adaptation performed on the fly by the magnet app.
  4. The user can have a quick scan on the content shown on the tiles for every beacon in the vicinity. Based on that information he can decide if he wants to click on a particular beacon to connect to its URL. Once the user clicks on the URL, the default browser of the device is opened with that URL and the navigation is handed over to it.

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