Toothspace was a location based device which was able to track and react to bluetooth devices.

The original concept was created in response to a competition entry. It detailed a reactive space which would reflect the inhabitants personalities based on their phone.

The system was developed soon after which allowed passing bluetooth devices to be tracked, make a good guess at determining the handset type, and to send messages or images to it.

Unsurprisingly, this got a good response from marketing firms that we demonstrated it to, and we engaged in many on-site trials of the system.

A successful example was when it was commissioned for a launch party. A whiteboard style space was projected onto a wall, and participants could send images to the wall to display to all.

The intention was to productise the hardware and software into a router sized box which could then be used by customers, linked to a server and control panel, to control their campaigns.

Tech Stack

The core of the system was a C++ application which would interface with Linux’s bluetooth stack and control querying and establishment of connections.

A javascript runtime was embedded which allowed applications to be defined with differing behaviours.

For different demos, various interactive front-ends were built, communicating with the core system using a text based protocol. Typically these would display the names of the devices detected.