Oklahoma Sooners use beacons, sensors to find rooms on massive campus

The University of Oklahoma has begun rolling out beacon technology to help students find study rooms and class information in its central library and other buildings by using their smartphones as they move about the vast campus in Norman, Okla.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon hardware and new analytics software from Aruba, accompanied by GPS and new sensors working over Wi-Fi, can put the power of smartphones, carried by virtually all 29,000 students, in direct contact with the massive and growing amounts of university data. Aruba is a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

"Students already have the smartphone technology in their pockets, so as they move about the giant buildings on campus, the user experience is more accessible. We can tie all our vast online resources to a location, combining the physical with the digital worlds," said Matt Cook, emerging technology librarian for OU's central library.

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