Physical Web

  • Project:
  • Clients:
  • Technology:
  • Roles:
  • Retail Shelf
  • Centrum
  • Raspberry Pi, BLE Beacon, NodeJS, Express
  • Prototyping, NodeJS and Express Developer,
    Physical Computing Engineer

The Centrum Retail Light Shelf prototype utilizes the Physical Web technology from Google. This allows a beacon to broadcast URLs using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to the surrounding environment. With one click, customers are able to view a website on a mobile device without the need for downloading an app. The Centrum Retail Light Shelf helps customers locate the right product in a congested retail shelf environment by displaying visual light cues highlighting the product.

A Raspberry Pi running NodeJS and Express was used to control the light shelf with URL parameters. The public URL was hosted on the Raspberry Pi with the help of NGROK tunneling service.