About Flare
Flare allows users with mobile devices to discover and interact with things in an environment. It combines multiple location technologies with a realtime communications architecture, to enable new kinds of user interactions. The Flare experience is:
- Mobile: the experience goes with the user and their devices
- Spatially aware: devices and things are aware of their location in the environment
- Glanceable: experiences can scale from simple glances to rich interactions
- Interactive: information and actions flow in both directions between users and things
- Generic: the same interaction model can be applied to multiple use cases
For example, when a user walks into a retail store holding a mobile phone or wearing a smart watch, their device could indicate the location of various products and interactive displays in the store. When they approach one of those things, their device can automatically pair with it, allowing them to get more information about a product or control an interactive display.
Video
Here's a short video that will give you a glimpse of what is possible with Flare.
Flare API
The Flare API moves the intelligence of the Internet of Things into the network. It enables a kind of distributed object-oriented programming where the network takes the complexity out of building innovative applications incorporating many different kinds of devices.
The Flare model defines environments that are divided into zones, each of which can contain numerous things: displays, beacons, lights, or even objects that don't have any electronics. These are all arranged in a spacial grid, so the API knows the location of every thing in the environment.
The Flare API is highly object-oriented. Environments, zones, things and personal devices are all Flare objects, and inherit many of the same properties and behaviors. Flare objects have data values that can be read and written using the network, with state synchronized between devices using push notifications. Flare objects can also respond to actions, which can be custom-tailored for each application.
Flare uses this common foundation to enable a variety of types of use cases. When a user enters an environment, their device can discover other things around them, and display an interface that shows the distance and direction of those things. When they approach a thing, they can have a variety of interactions: they can see more information about the thing on their device, they can communicate with the device and cause it to change, and they can perform actions that affect the thing, the zone that contains it, or the entire environment.
Discovery
The Flare API stores information about the location and size of environments, and the position of things inside zones in the environment. Environments each have a geofence that enables GPS-equipped devices to determine when they are inside of a particular environment.
Personal devices can establish their location in an environment using a variety of technologies. Devices can sense their proximity to Bluetooth-enabled beacons, CMX access points can detect the location of devices over Wi-Fi, or other methods can be used. Flare handles the location of personal devices as dynamic data that is synchronized using the network: a device that calculates its own location using beacons can tell other things where it is, and similarly systems that sense the device can tell the device where it is.
Once a device knows its location in the environment, it can determine what zone it is in, and determine its spacial relationship to other things in the environment. It could then communicate this information to the user in several ways:
- Display a map of the environment or the current zone, including the position of the device and things around it
- Indicate the direction and distance towards nearby things
- Display an alert when in close proximity to a thing
The user device can determine its own position relative to things, and the server can also notify things and devices when they are in close proximity to each other using the Flare notification system.
Interaction
A user can then interact with a thing in a variety of ways:
- Getting object metadata: The user can find out basic information about the object such as its name, type, description, current location, etc. The user may interact with the object in different ways depending upon its type, e.g. beacon, basketball, etc.
- Getting the state of the object: Each object can have any number of variable properties, depending on the type of object and its capabilities. For example, the user can find out that the object is turned on, the volume is set to 10, the color is green, etc.
- Changing the state of the object: The user can interact with objects by changing their variable properties. For example, they can turn the object on or off, set the volume to 11, change the color to purple, etc.
- Getting actions: The user can find out what they can do with the object. Different kinds of objects have different types of possible interactions. These actions could be defined by the manufacturer or extended by the current owner, and could be based on the type of object or specific to a particular object.
- Performing actions: The user can perform one of the actions that they have discovered in the previous step. These actions could use the state variables as input and/or output, such as turning up the volume or going to the next page. Actions could also connect to other systems, allowing the user to buy the object, add it to their favorites, share it on a social network, etc.
In addition to interacting with individual things in the environment, the user can also get/set state variables or perform actions that apply to the current zone or the entire environment. For example, if the user sets the mood of the zone to “chill out”, each thing in the zone could react in its own way without the user having to tell each thing specifically what to do.
What happens when an action message is sent depends upon the capabilities of the thing. Things could be full-fledged computing devices, smaller connected devices with limited capabilities, or things with no electronics at all. The thing may respond directly to the action, it may receive an instruction over a custom interface, or the action could be handled by another server.