Beacons

What a Beacon is?

Beacons are one-way transmitters that can be used to mark important places and objects. They use technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy or WiFi to transmit information and are visible in ranges of few meters.

Physical Web beacons just transmit the URL linked to that object so that they can be discovered in a very simple way.

The protocol they use to transmit the URL depends on the technology used, for instance, for Bluetooth Low Energy, the Eddystone protocol is used. This protocol is specified as open source (https://github.com/google/eddystone).

Buying beacons:

If you want to buy Eddystone beacons, there is a full list of providers, all of them provide easy tools to configure the beacons (e.g. power to be transmitted, URL, etc.)

https://developers.google.com/beacons/eddystone#full_support_for_eddystone

Emulating Beacons:

Alternatively you can emulate a beacon by just downloading an application to your laptop.

Project magnet team has created his own Project Magnet application for Desktop, so you will be able to discover physical web content around and also use your laptop to broadcast a URL as it were a beacon.

There are other applications available in Internet as: https://github.com/dermike/electron-slide-beacon/releases where you can also check the source code and build the project on your own: https://github.com/dermike/electron-slide-beacon