  The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our
behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination
with the introduction of power efficient wireless communication technologies,
such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered
to shape the way we interact with our physical surroundings and thus build
entirely new experiences. However, our evaluations of BLE and its abilities to
facilitate mobile location-based experiences in public environments revealed a
number of potential problems. Most notably, the position and orientation of the
user in combination with various environmental factors, such as crowds of
people traversing the space, were found to cause major fluctuations of the
received BLE signal strength. These issues are rendering a seamless functioning
of any location-based application practically impossible. Instead of achieving
seamlessness by eliminating these technical issues, we thus choose to advocate
the use of a seamful approach, i.e. to reveal and exploit these problems and
turn them into a part of the actual experience. In order to demonstrate the
viability of this approach, we designed, implemented and evaluated the Ghost
Detector - an educational location-based museum game for children. By
presenting a qualitative evaluation of this game and by motivating our design
decisions, this paper provides insight into some of the challenges and possible
solutions connected to the process of developing location-based BLE-enabled
experiences for public cultural spaces.
