iBeacons in Unity. Asset Store Review.

This is a review about an Unity plug-in that you can find in the Assets Store. The component is called iBeacon and costs 15$. For a technological solution of that kind, I think is a fair price. The plug-in is the first of its kind in the Asset Store and it doesn't have any review yet. So let's get to it!

IBeacons are low-powered bluetooth devices. They are small as an egg and have a battery that can last years. Phones and tablets are able to connect to them an receive information witch makes location-based apps very convenient.

It main purpose of the iBeacons is shops, museums and touristic places. That sounds quite boring to be honest. Why not make some game with it? :)

Estimote iBeacons are one of the most popular. Cool design.

Right after buying the plug-in you can download it and import it to you project. Keep in mind that you can't move the imported folders. Some of them like the "Assets/Plugins" just have to be exactly there.

The plugin itself is quite simple and comes with one example of server and  client. The server is just the emulation of and iBeacon. If you have two Apple devices you can use them both to detect each other. I you have a real iBeacon you don't need the server at all.

To set up your game to detect your beacons you need to provide the UUID field to the iBeaconReceiver script. Note that the region field present there doesn't really do anything. The plugin also provide an example of how to create custom scripts that register to receive the beacon events. All the beacons from the same company share UUID. This is something good, since you need to know the UUID in other to be able to detect the beacons.

Every update of the beacons status you will receive inside Unity all the information you can ask for. For all the beacons detected you will get:
 - Mayor and minor (identificators)
 - How close are them (Unknown, Far, Close or Immediate)
 - Strength and accuracy of the signal.

Kontakt iBeacons. Bigger battery and better configuration app.

Before you test your new app with a real device, you have to be careful because as I write this post, you have to add manually add the CoreBluetooth framework into your Xcode project every time you build. This is done though the "Build Phase" tab, then "Link Binary with Libraries" and then find the framework in the list. It is an small pain in the ass, but the developer told me he will fix it in the next patch.


In conclusion the iBeacon component simply does what you expect from it. It took me a little bit of time to make it work, due to the technical problems witht he CoreBluetooth and I am not yet sure it works 100% of the time. Sometimes it doesn't detect the beacons until you leave and enter the area again. Also I would like to see Android compatibility some day.

All in all I definitively recommend this Plug-in: 4/5

★★★★☆

The kind of game you will develop now is just limited by your imagination! Will it be a hide and search multiplayer game? A real world adventure? What is best, it can be easily combined with another incredible technologies that already landed in Unity, like Augmented Reality (Vuforia) or Virtual Reality (Occulus Rift).

iBeacon Plugin in the Asset Store. Developed by Kaasa Solution Gmbh.

For those who doesn't know what the Asset Store an offer to them, they should start looking at it for time to time. There are sales regularly and it may happen that you find some plugin that you didn't know existed. Unity made a great job promoting the Asset Store, because it became a great way saving time for very little money.